Getting wifi MAC adress in Python

Question

I need to get the wifi unique ID. SSID is not safe as you can have different wifis with the same name, so I wen to find the MAC address of the router. So far I use arp to get this info but I found a wifi where the MAC address seems to change over time. Is this function the right one to retrieve the MAC adress of the wifi router ?

    def get_wifi_info(self):
        result = subprocess.run(["iwgetid"], capture_output=True, text=True)
        ssid = result.stdout.split('"')[1]

        arp_output = subprocess.check_output(["/usr/sbin/arp", "-a"]).decode("utf-8")
        mac_pattern = re.compile(r"..:..:..:..:..:..")
        mac_address = mac_pattern.findall(arp_output)

        return ssid, mac_address[0]

I am on Raspbian 11. Thanks for your help.

Peyman.H · Accepted Answer · 2024-10-15 12:57:48Z

0

You can get it using iwconfig with a little proccessing of its output:

try:
    output = subprocess.check_output(["iwconfig"], text=True)
    mac_address = None
    for line in output.splitlines():
        if "HWaddr" in line:
            mac_address = line.split()[1]
            break
    # now you have mac address
except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
    print("Failed to retrieve Wi-Fi MAC address.")

answered Oct 15, 2024 at 12:57

Peyman.H

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1 Comment

16ar Over a year ago

Thx. I don't get "HWaddr" in the ouput but I get the point. Here is what I get on the MAC adresse line : Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:11:32:50:EA:F3

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