title: Foreign characters and LDAP. What encoding/charset does LDAP expect?
body: <p>I am parsing XML, with <code>simplexml_load_string()</code>, and using the data within it to update Active Directory (AD) objects, via LDAP.</p>
  
  <p>Example XML (simplified):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
  &lt;users&gt;
      &lt;user&gt;Bìlbö Bággįnš&lt;/user&gt;
      &lt;user&gt;Gãńdåłf Thê Gręât&lt;/user&gt;
      &lt;user&gt;Śām Wīšë&lt;/user&gt;
  &lt;/users&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I firstly run an <code>ldap_search()</code> 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.</p>
  
  <p>For example: <code>BÃ¬lbÃ¶ BÃ¡ggÄ¯nÅ¡</code></p>
  
  <p><strong>I've tried the following functions, to no avail:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>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);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Ideally, I don't want to do any of these string conversions. UTF-8 <em>should</em> be fine, right?!</p>
  
  <p><strong>I've also noticed the following:</strong>
  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.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What's going on? Should I be looking at something else, eg. URL encoding?</strong>
  I'm hoping this is down to a simple mistake on my end.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong>
  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 <code>mb_detect_encoding()</code> will return UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Developing on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - PHP 5.4.3</li>
  <li>Running production on: Red Hat 6 - PHP 5.4.3</li>
  <li>AD server: Windows 2003</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong>
  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).</p>