working with ldap files

[Michael Ströder]

flit wrote:
> 
> I am struggling with some ldap files.

More general you are struggling with multiple attribute values of DN
syntax stored in a single field of a CSV file.

> I am using the csv module to work with this files (I exported the ldap
> to a csv file).

I guess you have MS AD and used MS tools for CSV export.

> I have this string on a field
> CN=pointhairedpeoplethatsux,OU=Groups,OU=Hatepeople,OU=HR,DC=fabrika,DC=com;CN=pointhairedboss,OU=Groups,OU=Hatepeople,OU=HR,DC=fabrika,DC=com
> this string is all the groups one user has membership.

It seems they are using ; as a delimiter for multi-valued attributes in
a single CSV field. Note that ; is also a special character for
LDAPv2-DNs. So a naive parsing will fail under special circumstances.

I'd recommend to export your data as LDIF and use the module 'ldif' from
python-ldap to extract the entry records. You can use this module
separately simply by placing the file ldif.py under site-packages/ if
you don't need the rest of python-ldap.

> So what I am trying to do.
> read this string
> and extract only the CNs

This is another issue.

Note that in general DN parsing is more complex than simply using
string.split(). If you are sure that all the attribute values used in
your DNs don't have any special chars you could use string.split(). But
you should definitely cross-check with RFC 4514 or use a decent DN parser.

Ciao, Michael.