(PHP 5 >= 5.1.0RC1)
inet_pton -- Converts a human readable IP address to its packed in_addr representationThis function converts a human readable IPv4 or IPv6 address (if PHP was built with IPv6 support enabled) into an address family appropriate 32bit or 128bit binary structure.
Note: This function is not implemented on Windows platforms.
See also ip2long(), inet_ntop(), and long2ip().