<?php
$ipaslong = ip2long("208.247.106.187");
print long2ip($ipaslong)."\n";
print bin2hex(pack("N", $ipaslong))."\n";
?>

That script run with PHP 4.0.5 prints:
208.247.106.187
d0f76abb

whereas with the latest CVS version it prints:
127.255.255.255
7fffffff

That makes that function completely unusable for me (and for others probably too). I have another proposal for fixing bug #9698, and that is implementing %u as a sprintf format specifier to output unsigned longs instead of signed.

This way he could use the following script for his problem (should go onto the ip2long page then):
<?php
$ip = gethostbyname("www.php.net");
$out = sprintf("http://%u/<br>\n", ip2long($ip));
echo $out;
?>

If that fix would be accepted (and the other fix rolled back), I could add %u to sprintf myself and post it here.