Re: Greek characters - Utf8 encoding.

[Chris R. <chr...@me...>]

James Chang <Jam...@ms...> wrote:
> Hi (guys), would someone please give me a definitive answer as to whether
> Net::LDAP 0.22 handles Utf 8?

Net::LDAP doesn't care what characters are used in attribute values - all
it does is set/get the bytes in scalars (strings.)

> I'm converting some ISO 8859-7 (Greek) characters into their equivalent
> Utf 8 mapping and was hoping (actually kind of depending) on the use of
> an ldap version 3 server to serve as a directory of this information
> (including the distinguished names).  I came across a posting from August
> which suggested that Utf 8 is not handled.  I'm using Perl 5.6 and
> Net::LDAP version 0.22.

Presumably you could also use an LDAPv2 server which implemented character
sets correctly (ie T.61, not UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1), but using UTF-8 and
LDAPv3 is probably easier.

So since Net::LDAP is character-set agnostic, it handles UTF-8 values OK.
What you do with the bytes of the value once you get them from Net::LDAP is
up to you. Presumably there are ways in perl 5.6 to convert a string full
of bytes which happen to be a UTF-8 representation of a string into a
string which is interpreted by perl as UTF-8. I seem to recall that perl
5.6 has ways to do these conversions.

Cheers,

Chris