Subject: Quoting of attribute values

From: Hallvard B Furuseth <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 16:49:49 +0100

draft-ietf-ldapbis-syntaxes-02.txt says:

> 2.1  Notation
>   In cases where an arbitrary string, not a Distinguished Name or part 
>   of one, is used in a value of an attribute, a backslash quoting 
>   mechanism is used to escape the following separator symbol 
                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   character, (such as, "'", "$" or "#") if it occurs in that 
>   string.  The backslash is followed by a pair of hexadecimal digits 
>   representing the next character.  A backslash itself in the string 
>   which forms part of a larger syntax is always represented as '\5C' 
>   or '\5c'.  An example is given in section 3.33, postalAddress syntax.

I'm not quite sure I understand this.  Does it mean that only syntaxes
with separators are quoted like this, or are backslashes quoted in
simple string syntaxes that do not have without separators too?
Also, is it _allowed_ to quote non-separator characters?

-- 
Hallvard

---

From: "Steven Legg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 16:05:07 +1100

Hallvard,

> >   mechanism is used to escape the following separator symbol 

I've thrown this paragraph out for the -04 draft and put explicit
ABNF in each syntax where it applies. In each case it is only the
specific separator character that is escaped (plus "\", of course). 

Regards,
Steven