Re: OpenLDAP UTF8 values support

[Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com>]

On 2018-03-21 16:42, Andre Rodier wrote:
> I want to use international characters for the "secondary" email
> addresses but and OpenLDAP is complaining about it, as invalid syntax.

That's because attribute 'mail' is defined to be IA5String syntax
which is more or less ASCII.

> Is there any limitation in OpenLDAP that would prevent some fields to
> be stored in UTF8 directly?

No. But the attribute type has to be declared to use DirectoryString 
syntax.

That's why I proposed 'intlMailAddr' herein:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-stroeder-mailboxrelatedobject-07#section-2

Note that this attribute only makes sense in case of non-ASCII local 
part
and for use with SMTPUTF8 extensions. I currently only know of one 
SMTPUTF8
implementation (postfix 3.x).

If the mail address' domain part is non-ASCII you should store it as 
IDNA encoding
(e.g. my web2ldap supports auto-converting the user's input.)

> I have noticed that the givenName and
> surname are automatically encoded in base64 when containing accents,
> so is it a standard practice?

The attribute values are *not* base64-encoded via LDAP.
What you're seeing as output of ldapsearch is LDIF representation
which has to be ASCII-clean (see RFC 2849).

Ciao, Michael.