Subject: RE: Insignificant space in matching rules

From: "Steven Legg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 15:45:13 +1100

Hallvard,

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> Sent: Sunday, 19 January 2003 7:47
> [Syntaxes] says:
> 
> > 5.2 Matching Rule Definitions
> >   When evaluating the caseExactIA5Match, caseIgnoreIA5Match, (...)
> >   leading and trailing whitespace is ignored
> 
>     except that a string consisting of only whitespace is treated
>     as a single space.
> 
> If leading whitespace were ignored in a space-only string, it would
> be treated as the invalid string "", so the filter would evaluate to
> undefined.

An empty string is invalid in the protocol, but it is not invalid as
an input to a server's internal implementation of the matching rule
functionality. Nor does "ignore" mean that a server must physically
transform the input strings before applying the matching rule function.

The current description is fine, and carries the implication that any
assertion or attribute value containing only one or more spaces is
equivalent to an empty string for comparison purposes. Two empty strings
obviously match.

Regards,
Steven