We needed to collect “Place” information per user from our LDAP server. The problem was that the description of the “Place” came out strangely encoded whenever it contained one of the norwegian characters æ,ø or å. The ldap command: ldapsearch -x -H ldap://ourldapserver.uib.no x121Address=XXXXXX where XXXXXX is the “place” code, gave a place description that