perl-ldap-dev

Greek characters - Utf8 encoding.

[James C. <Jam...@ms...>]

Hi (guys), would someone please give me a definitive answer as to whether
Net::LDAP 0.22 handles Utf 8?

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.

If not is there another way to do this using any other Perl LDAP module that
anyone's come across?  I did have a browse through CPAN but didn't find
anything else not related to Net::LDAP.

Thanks for your attention.

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

Re: Greek characters - Utf8 encoding.

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 01:33:46PM +0000, Chris Ridd wrote:
> 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.

In 5.6 (if Net::LDAP will work with 5.6) the strings should be returned as
UTF8 IIRC.

Graham.

Re: Greek characters - Utf8 encoding.

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

Graham Barr <gb...@po...> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 01:33:46PM +0000, Chris Ridd wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> In 5.6 (if Net::LDAP will work with 5.6) the strings should be returned as
> UTF8 IIRC.
> 
> Graham.

Even when talking to an LDAPv2 server? You don't know what character set is
being used by the LDAPv2 server, so converting to UTF-8 won't be possible.

Cheers,

Chris

Re: Greek characters - Utf8 encoding.

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2000 at 11:02:35AM +0000, Chris Ridd wrote:
> Graham Barr <gb...@po...> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 01:33:46PM +0000, Chris Ridd wrote:
> >> 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.
> > 
> > In 5.6 (if Net::LDAP will work with 5.6) the strings should be returned as
> > UTF8 IIRC.
> > 
> > Graham.
> 
> Even when talking to an LDAPv2 server? You don't know what character set is
> being used by the LDAPv2 server, so converting to UTF-8 won't be possible.

Hm, yes had not thought about that. Ah well if it causes a problem we will fix it.

Graham.