A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
The class java.net.InetAddress only provides the method InetAddress.getByName(String) for parsing IP address literals. However, if (for example due to a bug in an application) the address is malformed InetAddress might perform a host lookup which can be undesired.

See related StackOverflow questions and comments:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5571744/java-convert-a-string-representing-an-ip-to-inetaddress
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2309049/is-there-an-easy-way-to-convert-string-to-inetaddress-in-java

The need for such functionality has also caused Guava to have the InetAddresses class, see
https://guava.dev/releases/snapshot-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/net/InetAddresses.html

It would therefore be good to have the following methods:
- for parsing an IPv4 literal (this method could be part of Inet4Address)
- for parsing an IPv6 literal (this method could be part of Inet6Address)
- for parsing an IP address literal which is either IPv4 or IPv6

If a malformed IP address literal is provided, it might be good to either return null, or throw an exception, such as IllegalArgumentException.

Note that the functionality for this already exists in sun.net.util.IPAddressUtil, it "merely" has to be exposed as part of a public API.