Sometimes, you need to translate a machine's hostname into its corresponding IP address, for example, a quick domain name lookup. This recipe introduces a simple function to do that.
If you need to know the IP address of a remote machine, you can use a built-in library function, gethostbyname(). In this case, you need to pass the remote hostname as its parameter.
In this case, we need to call the gethostbyname() class function. Let's have a look at this short code snippet.
Listing 1.2 shows how to get a remote machine's IP address as follows:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and
Python 3.5.2.
# It may run on any other version with/without
modifications.
import socket
def get_remote_machine_info():
remote_host = 'www.python.org'
try:
print ("IP address of %s: %s" %(remote_host,
socket.gethostbyname(remote_host)))
...