Correct handling of NON-ASCII characters (was: php frontend)

[Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com>]

Terje Trane wrote:
> 
> Nice, though my homeaddress became
> 
>         SPhuc2tvZ2VuIDUgQywgMTM4NCBBU0tFUg==
> 
> It contains one non-7-bit ascii character.

Hmm, I guess the above example of behaviour is derived from LDIF
presentation of NON-ASCII values. IMHO this is not a correct
behaviour.

Handling of NON-ASCII characters in general and especially in DNs is
a pain. Even if you have a LDAP client which handles it correctly
you cannot be sure that other LDAP clients do. You always have to
carefully test ALL clients you need.

Most U.S. programmers announce sexy looking LDAP clients but does
not care about NON-ASCII characters at all since they ignore that
there's intelligent life outside U.S.
The common sense is to avoid NON-ASCII characters in DNs. But that's
pretty hard if you have an address book with person entries
containing neither uid, ASCII shortname or e-mail addresses.

I know exactly one LDAP client which comes close to correct
NON-ASCII handling.

I set Reply-To: openldap-general

Ciao, Michael.