Re: Charset nightmare

[John_Dale/SSW/Lotus@lotus.com]

Hello Yann,

As I recall, the Netscape clients I tried  use UTF-8 encoding for LDAPv2
protocol in places where the LDAPv2 specifications require T.61 encoding.  Thus,
it seemed to me that the Netscape behaviour was wrong.

The Microsoft products I tried used LDAPv3 protocol, using UTF-8 as per the
LDAPv2 protocol specificaitons.  I do not known what the MS products would have
done if the server had been an LDAPv2-only server.  However, from your remarks,
it appeared that Microsoft may be using 8859-1 when forced to bind as LDAPv2.

I found that some other LDAPv2 clients use 8859-1 encoding, which is permitted
in neither LDAPv2 nor LDAPv3, but appears to occur when programmers either don't
understand the LDAPv2 protocol and/or API, or when they develop programs that
must work with servers that use 8859-1.

I even found LDAPv2 clients and servers that use T.61 encoding, per the LDAPv2
specifications.

I agree with others who have concluded that, because of the variety of
incompatible implementations, non-ASCII characters should be avoided in LDAPv2
environments.  The alternative is to support clients exhibiting different
behaviour using separate servers operating in different configurations, as you
described.

John Dale
Lotus Development






Yann Doussot <doussot@gifrance.com> on 11/29/98 02:46:14 PM

To:   openldap-general@openldap.org
cc:    (bcc: John Dale/SSW/Lotus)
Subject:  Charset nightmare





     Hello,

     Can anyone give me an explanation on charsets in LDAP ? I've tried
a lot of things but I still have problems: my goal is to provide an LDAP
directory to Outlook Express and Netscape users with latin1 characters.
When I try to use latin1 character in OpenLDAP, it works for Outlook but
not in Netscape messenger. I also tried UTF8 encoding, works fine for
Netscape but display nonsense in OE. Is there a way to get around this ?
Which is to blame ? OE or Netscape or LDAP server ? (tried OpenLDAP stable
and devel versions)

     Thanks for any hints.

---
Yann Doussot <doussot@gifrance.com>
Grey Interactive - France - http://www.gifrance.com/
Cell: +33 6 12 71 70 03   Work: + 33 1 46 84 85 00