Extracting an IPv6 prefix from an IPv6 address

In your IPv6 application, you need to dig out the IPv6 address for getting the prefix information. Note that the upper 64-bits of an IPv6 address are represented from a global routing prefix plus a subnet ID, as defined in RFC 3513. A general prefix (for example, /48) holds a short prefix based on which a number of longer, more specific prefixes (for example, /64) can be defined. A Python script can be very helpful in generating the prefix information.

How to do it...

We can use the netifaces and netaddr third-party libraries to find out the IPv6 prefix information for a given IPv6 address.

Make sure to have netifaces and netaddr installed in your system:

$ pip install netaddr

The program is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition -- Chapter - 3 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
# This program depends on Python...