Some rather unfriendly software (Munin, lighttpd, etc.) require that IP ranges are specified using regexes instead of the usually more convenient CIDR notation. The following code converts instances of that notation to a regular expression.
The generated pattern assumes that the input is a valid IPv4 address; that is to say, matching 0.0.0.0/0. Patches for common prefix optimisation greatly appreciated.
def cidr_to_regex(cidr): ip, prefix = cidr.split('/') base = 0 for val in map(int, ip.split('.')): base = (base << 8) | val shift = 32 - int(prefix) start = base >> shift << shift end = start | (1 << shift) - 1 def regex(lower, upper): if lower == upper: return str(lower) from math import log10 exp = int(log10(upper - lower)) delta = 10 ** exp if lower == 0 and upper == 255: return "\d+" if delta == 1: val = "" for a, b in zip(str(lower), str(upper)): if a == b: val += str(a) elif (a, b) == ("0", "9"): val += '\d' elif int(b) - int(a) == 1: val += '[%s%s]' % (a, b) else: val += '[%s-%s]' % (a, b) return val def gen_classes(): floor_ = lambda x: int(round(x / delta, 0) * delta) xs = range(floor_(upper) - delta, floor_(lower), -delta) for x in map(str, xs): yield '%s%s' % (x[:-exp], r'\d' * exp) yield regex(lower, floor_(lower) + (delta - 1)) yield regex(floor_(upper), upper) return '|'.join(gen_classes()) def get_parts(): for x in range(24, -1, -8): yield regex(start >> x & 255, end >> x & 255) return '^%s$' % r'\.'.join(get_parts())