Re: a question regarding qdstring defn in RFC 2252

["David Cahlander" <david.a.cahlander@syntegra.com>]

The wording of this section is really a problem.  I am at a loss to
understand
what:

    the following separator symbol character (such as "'", "$" or "#")

means.  How can you specify "the following separator symbol character" and
then give an example of the characters.

Specific questions are:

    1. What is the treatment of \xx when the input is not part of a
production,
    and xx are hex digits?  My guess is that the characters are treated as
    actual characters and \xx is returned on a read (search) function.

    2. If the LDAP input is a production, the standard can be interpreted
    two ways.

        2.1 In a production, the backslash quoting mechanism is always
        recognized.  A Distinguished Name, in a production, uses the quote
        mechanism described for a DN as well as the \xx mechanism.

        2.2 In a production, the backslash quoting mechanism is recognized
        only for characters that separate fields of the specific production.
        A Distinguished Name, in a production, uses the quote mechanism
        described for a DN as well as the \xx mechanism.

    Is \xx always interpreted as a hex representation of a character in
    a production?

    3. With nested productions, as are used in some X500 syntaxes, when
    are the \xx fields converted to the characters?
---
David Cahlander David.A.Cahlander@syntegra.com 651-415-3171

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Wahl <Mark.Wahl@sun.com>
To: sanjay jain <sanjay.jain@software.com>
Cc: ldapext <ietf-ldapext@netscape.com>
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 10:50 AM
Subject: Re: a question regarding qdstring defn in RFC 2252


|
| RFC 2252 section 4.3:
|
|    In encodings where an arbitrary string, not a Distinguished Name, is
|    used as part of a larger production, and other than as part of a
|    Distinguished Name, a backslash quoting mechanism is used to escape
|    the following separator symbol character (such as "'", "$" or "#") if
|    it should occur in that string.  The backslash is followed by a pair
|    of hexadecimal digits representing the next character.  A backslash
|    itself in the string which forms part of a larger syntax is always
|    transmitted as '\5C' or '\5c'. An example is given in section 6.27.
|
| Mark Wahl
| Sun Microsystems, Inc.
|
|