std.net : Add a condition in parseIp4 function to check for localhost in the address

[palash25]

Hi, new to zig, started learning a few days ago, was playing around with it trying to connect to tcp server and I kept getting an error for my code which looked roughly like this

    var port: u16 = 6379;
    var addr = "localhost";
    var conn = try std.net.tcpConnectToAddress(try net.Address.parseIp4(addr, port));

the error said InvalidCharacter so I had to do a little digging and saw that while parsing the address the code was looking for "." which gave me the clue to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost and my code worked.

The TCP libraries that I have played around with in other languages accept both 127.0.0.1 and localhost I was wondering it it would be possible to add a condition to check for "localhost" in parseIp4 function.

Let me know if you would like a PR for this. 😄

[SuperAuguste]

Hey @palash25, welcome to the Zig community 🎉!

I've read your issue and disagree with you about the ambiguity of the tcpConnectToAddress function, because the parseIp4 function performs the parsing of the host, and in my opinion, it is adequately named as it only accepts IPv4 formatted addresses.

I think a topic that could definitely be up for discussion though is potentially resolving localhost to 127.0.0.1 in parseIp4.

[palash25]

you are right @SuperAuguste I didn't realise that we are already passing parseIp4 to the function, that was ignorant of me, thanks for pointing it out. 😅

I will change the title and description to add a special localhost case in parseIp4 function

[daurnimator]

I think a topic that could definitely be up for discussion though is potentially resolving localhost to 127.0.0.1 in parseIp4.

I don't like the idea of that.

[iansimonson]

I think you can use tcpConnectToHost instead which I believe works with both IP and hostname (did a quick test to confirm)

[andrewrk]

"parseIP" functions should not parse non-IP addresses. Seems like OP simply needs to call tcpConnectToHost.