On 20/1/06 4:13, Peter Marschall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > On Friday, 20. January 2006 15:00, Chris Ridd wrote: >> On 20/1/06 1:49, Peter Marschall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> as announced in my post from 28. October (see below) I have committed >>> a patch to perl-ldap's SVN that allows to get attribute values from LDAP >>> directories and LDIF files correctly encoded as Perl strings. >>> >>> This is especially interesting for people who have strings with non-ASCII >>> values in their directories. >> >> This sounds like a good idea, but the name "binary" is horribly overloaded >> and misused in LDAP. >> >> Can you think of a better name? Is something like "non-utf8" better? > > I was pondering quite a long time about the name or this option. > "binary" sounded the most correct name for it, since I consider the values > to be binary.
Sure, but then the LDAP RFC defined "binary" as a mechanism for transferring attribute values in BER, and then there are the "non-human-readable" attributes defined as OCTET STRINGs, like userPassword and jpegPhoto (and audio). It is a horrible mess. > (I ruled out "exact" since it might cause people to thank that the other > attrributes are not returned exactly but only as approximations ;-) > > But I am open for discussion. If possible I prefer names that can be used > without quotes as hash keys. (i.e. binary => qr/..../ vs. "non-utf8" => > qr/..../) > > Other ideas welcome ? > Something along the lines "bitwise-identical", "one-to-one", .... only shorter > and without "-" ;-) How about "bytes" or "raw"? >> You're also assuming that the received values will be UTF-8, which is not >> correct if you're talking to an LDAPv2 server. > > I am aware of that but I did not want to restrict this option to LDAPv3 only > as it may have some uses even with v2. E.g. I know of at least one LDAP > implementation that sends UTF8 even with LDAPv2. OK, so there are some very broken servers out there. > Maybe I should document it better ;-) Yes. > > BTW did I mention that this option is only effective with Perl 5.8+ ? Vaguely. Any specific version of 5.8? I'm not really familiar with how perl handles UTF-8 nowadays... > Another point worth mentioning is that with directories it only works for > reading, while with LDIF files it works for reading and writing. > The writing case with directories is IMHO handled by Convert::ASN1. How does that know which scalars are "bytes" or need converting from the locale into UTF-8 or T.61 (or ISO 8859-1 if the server's broken)? I think if you tell the search operation, you need to tell all the operations. Ooh - what happens to the DN arguments, do they get translated? Cheers, Chris
