IPv6 has a different representation format, where one (and only one) sequence of fields containing only 0 bytes may be replaced by a single '::', turning '2001:0:0:1:0:2' into '2001::1:0:2'.

I never quite understood why they chose to reuse the colon as a separator character, because this is problematic when you want to append a port number. '2001::1:0:2:8080' could either be '2001:0:0:1:0:2 on port 8080', or '2001:0:1:0:2:8080 on the default port'. The following (ugly) syntax is used to resolve that ambiguity: [2001::1:0:2]:8080.