convert IPv6 to decimal (ip number)

Question

I've been trying to convert all ip addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6) to decimal format (ip number), store those numbers in the database which already contains ip ranges and get country location based on user's IP. Although this can be done easily for IPv4 addresses, I run into a stone wall when it comes to IPv6 ones.

say the fallowing IP should be converted to decimal 2a03:29ff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff

I tested it through some online services (that convert IPv6 to decimal) simply to check the consistency, namely what my final result should look like.
https://www.ultratools.com/tools/decimalCalc
http://www.ipaddressguide.com/ipv6-to-decimal
both returned the same number - 55844004574745424515003293805316145151

now within my coldfusion code I first removed : from the IP to get hex format and then tried to convert it to decimal with this

<cfset ipv6='2a0329ffffffffffffffffffffffffff'>
<cfoutput>#inputBaseN(ipv6, 16)#</cfoutput>

resulting in error msg

is it possible to achieve this? what do you think about my approach for handling this sort of thing? is there a better way to get country location based on IP? note: do not want to rely on any online service!!

Answer 1

InputBaseN is trying to convert to an Integer, and that value is too big for the maximum Integer value, hence why the error is claiming it is not a valid number.

(The error is actually only thrown for hex values of 8000000000000000 and higher (i.e. 2⁶³ or higher, the max for Long) - between 2³¹ and 2⁶³-1 the InputBaseN function doesn't tell you it has failed but incorrectly returns zero.)

The solution is to create a BigInteger, which doesn't have a max value, and convert from your base 16 string like so:

BigInt = createObject("java","java.math.BigInteger").init( ipv6 , 16 ).toString()