Possible Duplicate:
How to store an IP in mySQL
I want to get the IP address from $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] and some other $_SERVER variables, which datatype is the right one for this?
Is it VARCHAR(n)?
This question is related to
php
mysql
types
ip-address
For IPv4 addresses, you can use VARCHAR to store them as strings, but also look into storing them as long integesrs INT(11) UNSIGNED. You can use MySQL's INET_ATON() function to convert them to integer representation. The benefit of this is it allows you to do easy comparisons on them, like BETWEEN queries
You have two possibilities (for an IPv4 address) :
varchar(15), if your want to store the IP address as a string
192.128.0.15 for instanceinteger (4 bytes), if you convert the IP address to an integer
3229614095 for the IP I used before
The second solution will require less space in the database, and is probably a better choice, even if it implies a bit of manipulations when storing and retrieving the data (converting it from/to a string).
About those manipulations, see the ip2long() and long2ip() functions, on the PHP-side, or inet_aton() and inet_ntoa() on the MySQL-side.
Source: Stackoverflow.com