Note that I used the IPv4 address format only as an example. There are 
plenty of other more complex cases for which we really need to capture the 
multiple occurences of a capturing group within a repetition.

I'm NOT asking you how to parse it using MULTIPLE regexps and functions. 
Of course you can, but this is a distinct problem, but certinaly NOT a 
general solution (your solution using split() will NOT work with really A 
LOT of other regular expressions).