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user42235
Asked: 2010-11-25 14:48:50 +0800 CST

How can one distinguish the host and the port in an IPv6 URL?

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URLs always have this format:

<protocol>://<host>[:<port>]/[<path>][#<hash>]

The problem is that IPv6 uses colons, just like the separator of port and host, e.g:

2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8

But what if this is the host, and I want to connect to it with HTTP on port 100?

http://2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8:100/

The problem is the last colon. Since zero's are omitted with double colons (between 1f70 and 999), it's unknown if ':100' belongs to the IP or the port number. How can we know this?

url ipv6

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The notation in that case is to encode the IPv6 IP number in square brackets:

    http://[2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8]:100/

    That's RFC 3986, section 3.2.2: Host

    A host identified by an Internet Protocol literal address, version 6 [RFC3513] or later, is distinguished by enclosing the IP literal within square brackets ("[" and "]"). This is the only place where square bracket characters are allowed in the URI syntax. In anticipation of future, as-yet-undefined IP literal address formats, an implementation may use an optional version flag to indicate such a format explicitly rather than rely on heuristic determination.

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