Foreign characters and LDAP. What encoding/charset does LDAP expect?
active-directory, encoding, ldap, php
Solution
Are you using LDAP v3?
ldap_set_option($ldap, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3);
LDAPv3 supports UTF-8 by default, which it expects requests and responses to be in by default. See here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961766.aspx
Problem
I am parsing XML, with `simplexml_load_string()`, and using the data within it to update Active Directory (AD) objects, via LDAP. Example XML (simplified): ``` <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <users> <user>Bìlbö Bággįnš</user> <user>Gãńdåłf Thê Gręât</user> <user>Śām Wīšë</user> </users> ``` I firstly run an `ldap_search()` to find a single user and then proceed to change their attributes. Pumping the above values straight into AD, using LDAP, will result in some pretty mangled characters showing up. For example: `Bìlbö BággįnÅ¡` I've tried the following functions, to no avail: ``` utf8_encode($str); utf8_decode($str); iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $str); iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $str); iconv("UTF-8", "T.61", $str); ``` Ideally, I don't want to do any of these string conversions. UTF-8 should be fine, right?! I've also noticed the following: I have printed out the values to see how they come out. curl-ing the script in CLI will show the correct characters, but web browsers show the same as AD. What's going on? Should I be looking at something else, eg. URL encoding? I'm hoping this is down to a simple mistake on my end. EDIT: I entered in these characters using AD admin GUI to see how they would come out. I can read them via LDAP fine. Correct characters are displayed when in a browser. curl-ing via CLI will show question marks instead of foreign characters. Passing one of these returned values into `mb_detect_encoding()` will return UTF-8. I decided to immediately modify the same object by not writing in a new string, but just reversing the existing value and saving the object. This works fine - I see the correct value (reversed) in AD. - Developing on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - PHP 5.4.3 - Running production on: Red Hat 6 - PHP 5.4.3 - AD server: Windows 2003 UPDATE: After a few months, I was unable to find the answer/solution to this problem. In the end, I went with replacing characters to their non-accented equivalent (NOT ideal, I know).