How can I check if an Ethereum address is valid?

Question

I've read many times that you should never input an address by hand unless you want to accidentally send Ether into no-mans-land. I'd like to know what those checksums might be.

1. Is there a way to tell a typo is occurred?
2. How, and what are the formatting rules to it?

Im asking so I can potentially create a wrapper function that checks for these things before submitting to the network.

Answer 1

Updates (June 2023)

web3.utils.isAddress will soon be deprecated. Please use web3-validator package instead. Example:

import { isAddress } from 'web3-validator';

isAddress('blah');

Using a Library (June 2016)

Libraries like web3.js and ethers have isAddress().

Examples:

• ethers.utils.isAddress('0x8ba1f109551bd432803012645ac136ddd64dba72'); // true

• web3.utils.isAddress('blah'); // false

The following is an answer from 2016.

Regular Address

EIP 55 added a "capitals-based checksum" which was implemented by Geth by May 2016. Here's Javascript code from Geth:

/**
 * Checks if the given string is an address
 *
 * @method isAddress
 * @param {String} address the given HEX adress
 * @return {Boolean}
*/
var isAddress = function (address) {
    if (!/^(0x)?[0-9a-f]{40}$/i.test(address)) {
        // check if it has the basic requirements of an address
        return false;
    } else if (/^(0x)?[0-9a-f]{40}$/.test(address) || /^(0x)?[0-9A-F]{40}$/.test(address)) {
        // If it's all small caps or all all caps, return true
        return true;
    } else {
        // Otherwise check each case
        return isChecksumAddress(address);
    }
};

/**
 * Checks if the given string is a checksummed address
 *
 * @method isChecksumAddress
 * @param {String} address the given HEX adress
 * @return {Boolean}
*/
var isChecksumAddress = function (address) {
    // Check each case
    address = address.replace('0x','');
    var addressHash = sha3(address.toLowerCase());
    for (var i = 0; i < 40; i++ ) {
        // the nth letter should be uppercase if the nth digit of casemap is 1
        if ((parseInt(addressHash[i], 16) > 7 && address[i].toUpperCase() !== address[i]) || (parseInt(addressHash[i], 16) <= 7 && address[i].toLowerCase() !== address[i])) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
};

ICAP Address

ICAP has a checksum which can be verified. You can review Geth's icap.go and here's a snippet from it:

// https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Number#Validating_the_IBAN
func validCheckSum(s string) error {
    s = join(s[4:], s[:4])
    expanded, err := iso13616Expand(s)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    checkSumNum, _ := new(big.Int).SetString(expanded, 10)
    if checkSumNum.Mod(checkSumNum, Big97).Cmp(Big1) != 0 {
        return ICAPChecksumError
    }
    return nil
}

Answer 2

There is an easier way now with web3:

Naive:
https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.2.0/web3-utils.html#isaddress

web3.utils.isAddress('0xc1912fee45d61c87cc5ea59dae31190fffff232d');
> true

OR
Better version
https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.2.0/web3-utils.html#tochecksumaddress

try {
  const address = web3.utils.toChecksumAddress(rawInput)
} catch(e) { 
  console.error('invalid ethereum address', e.message) 
}

using checkSum method is better because you will always deal with data and never have to lowerCase.

Answer 3

The standard 40 character hex addresses now have a checksum in the form of capitalization. If the address has at least one capital letter then it is checksummed and, if inputted on a site that checks the sum, it will return false if it's not a valid address.

The scheme is as follows:

convert the address to hex, but if the ith digit is a letter (ie. it's one of abcdef) print it in uppercase if the ith bit of the hash of the address (in binary form) is 1 otherwise print it in lowercase

You can read VBs full writeup here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/55

Answer 4

function validateInputAddresses(address) {
        return (/^(0x){1}[0-9a-fA-F]{40}$/i.test(address));
}

Answer 5

The python package 'ethereum' has a function called 'check_checksum' in the utils module:

from ethereum.utils import check_checksum
check_checksum('0xc1912fee45d61c87cc5ea59dae31190fffff232d')
> True

I build a small project for this which i use programmatically in my apps. It has a 'micro' api:

https://balidator.io/api/ethereum/0xea0258D0E745620e77B0A389e3A656EFdb7Cf821

It also has address validation for bitcoin, monero, and ripple.

You can find the documentation here: balidator.io/api-documentation

Answer 6

So far ether addresses have no checksum and are simply the HEX encoding of the address bytes. There is however a proposal for encoding and checksum, see: ICAP: Inter exchange Client Address Protocol.

ICAP has preliminary support merged in some Ethereum client.

Answer 7

Checksums are mechanisms to prevent sending funds to wrong addresses (set by mistake or by a malicious party).

Programmatically

You can use web3's amazing utils:

web3.utils.toChecksumAddress(value)

The function above works only if you have version 1.0.0 or above.

Web

I created an online tool, check it out here: EthSum.

Answer 8

Another way to check is if you also have the public key of the ethereum address. The Ethereum Foundation's official eth-keys Python library can be used, and is now part of their Github repo and can be seen here and contains a suite of tools that include ways to check address validity, such as using the PublicKey().checksum_address() method (see below example).

The following method requires the uncompressed public key in bytes format, which means it would have to be only for accounts you have the public-key data for:

 >>>from eth_keys import keys
 
 >>>keys.PublicKey(b'\x98\xbb\xfa\xdd\xbc\xc7\xab\x14\xa3\x9c\xb4\x84\xbf\x94MO\xf5\x91^G\xc1\xc2\x0b\xe77t\xc3\xd0\x05\x12|Z\xf5\x17PZ\x97\xe2\\`IR\xc1\xbd\x10\xa3\xa3\xdf\xbf0\xaf;7\xc0z\xbc\xc7\x0b\x9c\xbd<FY\x98').to_checksum_address()
        
        '0x28f4961F8b06F7361A1efD5E700DE717b1db5292'

Answer 9

Or in Python (with Web3py)

from web3 import Web3

print(Web3.isAddress("0xBB9923E927F0bC33C901396F4C589B43DB991705"))