NAME
   Net::IP::Match - Efficiently match IP addresses against IP ranges

VERSION
   version 1.101700

SYNOPSIS
     use Net::IP::Match;

     if(__MATCH_IP($_, qw{10.0.0.0/8 87.134.66.128
       87.134.87.0/24 145.97.0.0/16})) {
           # ...
     }

DESCRIPTION
   This module provides you with an efficient way to match an IP address
   against one or more IP ranges. Speed is the key issue here. If you have
   to check several million IP addresses, as can happen with big logs,
   every millisecond counts. If your way to check an address involves a
   method call and some temporary variables, a lot of time is burnt. In
   such a time-critical loop you don't want to make subroutine calls at
   all, as they involve stack operations.

   So the approach we take here is that of a macro, preprocessed through
   Perl's source filter mechanism.

   You get a function (or at least something that looks like a function)
   called "__MATCH_IP" that takes a string that is to be matched against
   one or more IP ranges which are specified as the remaining args. The
   first argument can be a literal string or a variable; the other args can
   only be literal strings.

   The function returns a boolean value depending on whether there is a
   match.

   For example, the following are legal:

     __MATCH_IP('192.168.1.4', '192.168.0.0/16')
     __MATCH_IP('192.168.1.4', '10.0.0.0/8', '202.175.29.0/24')
     __MATCH_IP($some_ip, qw{ 10.0.0.0/8 202.175.29.0/24 })

   The following won't work because the source filter doesn't handle nested
   parentheses:

     __MATCH_IP('192.168.1.4', ('10.0.0.0/8', '202.175.29.0/24'))

   The following won't work because the source filter is invoked at
   compile-time, so the ranges to be transformed need to be known at that
   time:

     __MATCH_IP($some_ip, @ranges)

INTERNALS
   The source filter turns this function into a series of bit shift and
   short-circuit logical OR operations. No subroutine calls are involved.
   For example, the following call:

     __MATCH_IP('192.168.1.4', qw{ 10.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/16 })

   would be turned into:

     do {
       my $__tmp_match_ip = unpack("N", pack("C4", split(/\./, '192.168.1.4')));
       10 == $__tmp_match_ip >> 24 || 49320 == $__tmp_match_ip >> 16
     }

   As a special case, if you're matching against a specific IP address (as
   opposed to a range), no bit shifts are involved:

     __MATCH_IP($some_ip, qw{ 10.0.0.0/8 192.168.1.4 })

   becomes

     do {
       my $__tmp_match_ip = unpack("N", pack("C4", split(/\./, $some_ip)));
       10 == $__tmp_match_ip >> 24 || 3232235780 == $__tmp_match_ip
     }

   Furthermore, if there is only one IP range to match against, the
   temporary variable and the do-block aren't necessary either:

     __MATCH_IP($some_ip, '192.168.0.0/16')

   becomes:

     (49320 == unpack("N", pack("C4", split(/\./, $some_ip))) >> 16)

   and that's about as efficient as it gets.

DEBUGGING
   If you want to see the output of the source filter, set $::debug to a
   true value by the time the source filter runs. One way to achieve this
   is:

     perl -s my_program.pl -debug

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
   Of course, a C implementation would have been even faster, but you would
   have to call it as a function, which would add the stack overhead.
   Richard Clamp had the interesting idea of optimizing the generated
   opcode tree.

INSTALLATION
   See perlmodinstall for information and options on installing Perl
   modules.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
   No bugs have been reported.

   Please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at
   <http://rt.cpan.org>.

AVAILABILITY
   The latest version of this module is available from the Comprehensive
   Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Visit <http://www.perl.com/CPAN/> to find a
   CPAN site near you, or see <http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-IP-Match/>.

   The development version lives at
   <http://github.com/hanekomu/Net-IP-Match/>. Instead of sending patches,
   please fork this project using the standard git and github
   infrastructure.

AUTHOR
     Marcel Gruenauer <[email protected]>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
   This software is copyright (c) 2002 by Marcel Gruenauer.

   This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
   the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.