Re: using UTF-8 in openldap 2.0.7

["Tardis" <tardis@writeme.com>]

Hello David and all,


 10 May 2001, at 12:41, David Olivier wrote:

> > I've had the same problem as you with French extended chars 
in
> > ISO-8859-1 format and, well, I have decided to keep using ISO-
> > 8859-1 data.
> 
> That's what I did first and am still doing in my ldap v2 base. But
> it's against the rules. Since in ldap v3 the rules exist and are
> rather clear (they weren't in v2), it seems best to use them, if
> possible. 
> 
> In my experience clients are not all compatible with raw ISO8859-
1 
> encoding. For instance Netscape Communicator (4.77) does not
> interpret it correctly. Try for instance: 

Indeed, I did not know that. This is a real shame.
 
(...)
> I have another client, a mail client called Mulberry; its LDAP
> address lookup doesn't work correctly with UTF-8 encoded values.
> But I suppose they will fix that. I imagine clients will more and
> more be UTF-8 compliant. Since an LDAP server is usually meant to
> be at least partly world-readable, I think it's better to stick to
> the rules. 

Well, the LDAP server I'm trying to setup is for restricted use of the 
10 users in our network. The database contains the details of our 
clients and we do not wish that to be world-readable ;-)

Seriously, the main reason why I prefer ISO8859-1 data is because 
we are using Pegasus mail as the mailer for all the user's W9x 
computers. The LDAP client of Pegasus does not interpret UTF-8 
characters. So are the pages of our intranet in which I would like to 
display the results of the queries and get data to send to the LDAP 
server without having to program too complex manipulations. > But 
I understand that if you're new to LDAP there can be more > 
important issues to clear up first!  

Yes I have loads of questions. Anyway if someone has an answer 
of even an hint to my question of May 8, 2001 I would really 
appreciate the help (even if you have no idea, I would appreciate 
anything, yes I'm desperate at the moment).

In any case ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 conversion and vice versa is not a 
problem in Perl, I do :

#!/usr/bin/perl

use MIME::Base64;
use Unicode::MapUTF8 qw(to_utf8 from_utf8 
utf8_supported_charset);

$sn= to_utf8({ -string => $sn, -charset => 'ISO-8859-1' });
$sn= encode_base64($sn); chop $sn;

The Unicode::MapUTF8 module supports a number of other 
encoding including Japanese.


Ciao

--
Tardis