Ldap module and base64 oncoding

[Joseph L. Casale]

> Note that all modules in python-ldap up to 2.4.10 including module 'ldif'
> expect raw byte strings to be passed as arguments. It seems to me you're
> passing a Unicode object in the entry dictionary which will fail in case an
> attribute value contains NON-ASCII chars.

Yup, I was.

> python-ldap expects raw strings since it's not schema-aware and therefore does
> not have any knowledge about the LDAP syntax used for a particular attribute
> type. So automagically convert Unicode strings will likely fail in many cases.
> => The calling application has to deal with it.

I see, that recco went a long a way in cleaning up my code actually and making the
handling of decoding and encoding more consistent.

> Don't muck with overriding  _unparseAttrTypeandValue(). Simply pass the
> properly encoded data into ldif module.

I had some time today, so I attempted to open the ldif files in binary mode to simply
work with the raw byte strings but the moment the first entry was parsed, parse()
stumbled on a character in the first entries dict and passed a dn of None for the last half?

If the option to avoid worrying about decoding and encoding could work, I would be
happy to process the whole lot in byte strings. Any idea what may cause this?

Thanks a lot Michael,
jlc