ldap_bv2dn() accepts an empty string "", returning a NULL dn which is what l_ldap_str2dn doesn't handle. I admit it's not documented that it's not an empty list (what's expected here). But I think passing None (= NULL) to ldap_bv2dn() should (still) raise an error (ValueError?).

No, ldap_bv2dn() is not designed to take an empty string as berval input. The code has an assert bvin->bv_val != NULL, which fails and crashes with an empty string when OpenLDAP is compiled with asserts enabled. The ticket has more details.

The function accepts None because it uses z# to parse the input value. z# accepts an UTF-8 string, bytes-like object, or None.

No, ldap_bv2dn() is not designed to take an empty string as berval input. The code has an assert bvin->bv_val != NULL, which fails and crashes with an empty string when OpenLDAP is compiled with asserts enabled. The ticket has more details.

You're talking about different things:

• empty string "" ({ .bv_val = "", .bv_len = 0 })
• BVNULL ({ .bv_val = NULL, .bv_len = 0 })
• NULL pointer

The first is allowed, the other two are not.

The function accepts None because it uses z# to parse the input value. z# accepts an UTF-8 string, bytes-like object, or None.

And what I'm saying is we raise ValueError on None? Others are handled as usual.