getting inet out of char?

Hi,

Since everyone here has been so helpful in the past (even when I recently
overlooked something obvious in The Fine Material), I wonder if I might get
a pointer about what to do in this case.

I have a table mapping names to ips; the access to users is through PHP3.
Now, PHP's module to PostgreSQL does not know about the data type inet. I
could just forget about it, but it seems to me the inet data type offers a
number of advantages for easy data extraction. So, I thought the answer
would be simple: I created two tables.

Table "name_and_ip"
Attribute | Type | Modifier
-----------+-------------+----------
name | varchar(30) | not null
ip | char(15) | not null
Indices: name_and_ip_ip_key,
name_and_ip_name_key

Table "name_and_ip_v4"
Attribute | Type | Modifier
-----------+-------------+----------
name | varchar(30) | not null
ip | inet | not null
Indices: name_and_ip_v4_ip_key,
name_and_ip_v4_name_key

And I thought to have a rule:

create rule name_ip_update as on update to name_and_ip do insert into
name_and_ip_v4(name,ip) values (new.name, new.ip::inet);
ERROR: Cannot cast type 'bpchar' to 'inet'

Is there something else I can do? (Having followed the recent discussion on
rules and triggers, I thought a rule was what I wanted.)

Thanks,
A

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