Fuck that, if for whatever reason I'm writing an IP validator by hand I'm disallowing leading zeros. Parsers are very inconsistent, some will parse 010 as 10, others as 0o10 == 8 (you can try that right now with a POSIX ping). Talk about a footgun.

Definitely, tho if you store it as a u32 that is fixed magically. Because 1.2.3.4 and 1.02.003.04 both map to the same number.

What I mean by storing it as a u32 is to convert it to a number, similar to how the IP gets sent over the wire, so for v4:

octet[3] | octet[2] << 8 | octet[1] << 16 | octet[0] << 24

or in more human terms:

(fourth octet) + (third octet * 256) + (second octet * 256^2) + (first octet * 256^3)