[issue41820] ipaddress Library gives me incorrect results

[Eric V. Smith]

Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> added the comment:

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> '172.16.254.00' *is not* equivalent to '172.16.254.0'

Do you have an RFC or other document that makes that clear? I've never seen an IP address library that makes a distinction between '00' and '0'. But I'm happy to learn something new, if you can point to a standard.

If this were going to be an error, it would be in the call to ipaddress.ip_address() or its equivalent. It would raise ValueError, like it does for other strings that don't represent valid addresses. But for backward compatibility reasons, unless there's a standard that explicitly disallows .00, I doubt we'd change the code to raise an exception. And even if there were a standard that says .00 is not a valid address, I'd be reluctant to make a change here. We could potentially break people's code, and we'd need a very good reason to do that.

Also, is this causing you a practical problem? Is there somewhere you're getting a .00 address and you'd like to treat it as being invalid?

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue41820>
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