inet_pton is a function used in computer programming to convert an IPv4 or IPv6 address from text format to binary form. The “pton” in the name stands for “presentation-to-network”, indicating that the function takes an IP address in presentation (human-readable) format and converts it to network (machine-readable) format.
The inet_pton function is part of the standard C library and can be used on any operating system that supports networking. It takes two arguments: the first is an integer representing the IP address version (either AF_INET for IPv4 or AF_INET6 for IPv6), and the second is a pointer to a character array containing the IP address string.
The function returns 1 if successful, indicating that the conversion was completed successfully and that the resulting binary representation of the IP address is stored in a structure pointed to by its third argument. If there is an error, such as an invalid IP address string or unsupported IP version, inet_pton returns 0.
