I have a long and unfriendly history with PHP. Since I moved to serious languages such as Python, these dark times are over. However, a colleague asked me for some help with his PHP application. He wanted to check user name and password against the LDAP interface of a Lotus Notes server. Here is the code snippet.

I left out the HTML form code that fills the $_POST variables. The “uid” attribute as anchor to find further information might not work in other directories than Notes. Use a tool on your server to find the right one.

Please note that PHP silently performs an anonymous bind if the provided password in ldap_bind() is empty. Please also note the very “advanced” result structure of ldap_get_entries(). No further comment …
[sourcecode language='php']
if ($_POST["user"]) {
if (trim($_POST["pw"])==”") die(“Empy password not allowed”);
$server=ldap_connect(“our.ldap.server.se”);
if (@ldap_bind($server, $_POST["user"], $_POST["pw"])) {
print “Good one
“;
} else {
print “Go away
“;
}
// for fun, get all available info about this guy
$query=ldap_search($server, “”, “(uid=” . $_POST["user"] .”)”);
$res=ldap_get_entries($server, $query);
for($entry=0; $entry < $res["count"]; $entry++)
for($attr=0; $attr < $res[$entry]["count"]; $attr++) {
$attrname=$res[$entry][$attr];
for ($val=0; $val < $res[$entry][$attrname]["count"]; $val++) {
$actval=mb_convert_encoding($res[$entry][$attrname][$val], "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8");
print $attrname . ": " . $actval . "
“;
}
}
}
[/sourcecode]