Ldap module and base64 oncoding

[Joseph L. Casale]

> I'm not sure what exactly you're asking for.
> Especially "is not being interpreted as a string requiring base64 encoding" is
> written without giving the right context.
> 
> So I'm just guessing that this might be the usual misunderstandings with use
> of base64 in LDIF. Read more about when LDIF requires base64-encoding here:
> 
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2849
> 
> To me everything looks right:
> 
> Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 14 2012, 08:58:41) [GCC] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> 'ZGV0XDMzMTB3YmJccGc='.decode('base64').decode('utf-8')
> u'det\\3310wbb\\pg'
> >>>
> 
> What do you think is a problem?

Michael,
Thanks for the reply. The issues I am sure are in my code, I read the ldif source file and up
with a values such as 'det\3310wbb\pg' after the base64 encoded entries are decoded.

The problem I am having is when I add this to an add/mod entry list and write it back out.
As it does not get re-encoded to base64 the ldif file ends up seeing a text entry with a ^]
character which if I re-read it with the parser it causes the handle method to break midway
through the entry dict and so the last half re-appears disjoint without a dn.

Like I said, I am pretty sure its my poor misunderstanding of decoding and encoding.
I am using the build from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ on a windows
2008 r2 server.

I have re-implemented handle to create a cidict holding all the dn/entry's that are parsed as
I then perform some processing such as manipulating attribute values in the entry dict. I
am pretty sure I am breaking things here. The data I am reading is coming from utf-16-le
encoded files and has Unicode characters as the source directory is globally available, being
written to in just about every country.

Is there a process for manipulating/adding data to the entry dict before I write it out that I
should adhere to? For example, if I am adding a new attribute to be composed of part of
another parsed attr for use in a modlist:

  {'customAttr': ['foo.{}.bar'.format(entry['uid'])]}

By looking at the value from above, 'det\3310wbb\pg', I gather the entry dict was parsed
into byte strings. I should have decoded this, where as some of the data is Unicode and
as such I should have encoded it?

I really appreciate the time.

Grazie per tutto,
jlc