C# UserPrincipalName with accents/diacritics

Question

In some point of an MVC application, I do a search to Active Directory to get users account that contains that pattern. The problem is, at my company, some users have accents/diacritics on their UserPrincipalName and when I do the search, with the accents, those users don't exist. But if I do the search without the accents, the application find those users.

I already tried to convert the string to Unicode, but doesn't work. I used this, this, this and some others that I can't find.

public static List<string> SearchUsername(string __Pattern)
    {
        __Pattern = __Pattern.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);
        var chars = __Pattern.Where(c => CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c) != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark).ToArray();
        __Pattern =  new string(chars).Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC);

        List<string> Result = new List<string>();

        PrincipalContext Ldap = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["LdapConnection"]);

        UserPrincipal User = new UserPrincipal(Ldap);
        User.UserPrincipalName = __Pattern + "*@cebi.org.pt";

        PrincipalSearcher Search = new PrincipalSearcher(User);

        foreach (var UserFound in Search.FindAll())
        {
            Result.Add(UserFound.UserPrincipalName.ToString().Split('@').First());
        }

        return Result;
    }

Whats wrong with the solutions in the links you have linked to? — Tamir Vered, Sep 16 '15 at 15:48
What is the value of `__Pattern` when you are on a breakpoint on the line where you define `List Result`? — Tamir Vered, Sep 16 '15 at 16:08
At the breakpoint, the value is Lu�s. The same when the function is called — Hugo Rodrigues, Sep 16 '15 at 16:12
The string you are passing the method should already contain Unicode characters and doesn't need to be modified. String/Char in VS is two bytes wide with a private property that indicates that each character is either one or two bytes. I would eliminate all the string conversion in your code. The issue is the string you are passing the method is incorrect. — jdweng, Sep 16 '15 at 16:57
@jdweng thanks for the tip. I removed the accents using JavaScript before the string going to the controller and now it works. — Hugo Rodrigues, Sep 17 '15 at 08:51

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 16 '15 at 18:00

The link contains few solutions, some of the ignore several characters used in different languages.

The following code is in one of the answers of one of them and seems to work better even though it is not signed as the correct answer.

string accentedStr;
byte[] tempBytes;
tempBytes = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-8").GetBytes(accentedStr);
string asciiStr = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(tempBytes);

This is done by converting the text for Hebrew Unicode which lacks the characters with accents, and encode it back to UTF8.

Try if this method fits your character set.

Thanks, I will try tomorrow – Hugo Rodrigues Sep 16 '15 at 18:50 — Hugo Rodrigues, Sep 16 '15 at 18:50

C# UserPrincipalName with accents/diacritics

1 Answers1