Programming Guides › Connector Programming Guide › Connector Concepts › Special Character Considerations

Special Character Considerations

Pay careful attention to the testing the handling of special characters early in the design and prototyping stage. Problems handling special characters in RDN values have been known to force which API is used. It is important to quote any characters that are special to the connector's chosen API correctly on the way into and out of the native endpoint system, and to quote any characters special to LDAP.

The SimpleLdapName and SimpleRdn classes come in handy when dealing with native names and DNs.

Quote the following special characters with a preceding \ (backslash) character when they appear in Relative Distinguished Name (RDN) values (which appear at each level of a DN).

• A space or # (number sign or pound sign) character occurring at the beginning of the string
• A space character occurring at the end of the string
• , (comma)
• + (plus sign)
• " (quotation mark)
• \ (backslash)
• < > (angle brackets or chevrons)
• ; (semi-colon)

  Note: For more information, see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2253.txt

Multi-byte characters can be represented as \HH, where each H is a hex digit.

The following table lists the special characters that need to be quoted with a preceding \ (backslash) when they appear in LDAP search filters (used internally by CA IAM CS in reverse association handling):