Extracting CN's with LDAP? - perl

Question

I have this code
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Net::LDAP;
use Data::Dumper;
my $dn="CN=...";
my $password="xxx";
my $ldap = Net::LDAP->new('example.com') or die "$#";
my $mesg = $ldap->bind($dn, password=>$password);
if ($mesg->code) { die "uuuu $mesg"; }
$mesg = $ldap->search(base => "dc=test,dc=example,dc=com", filter => "(name=LIST)",);
my $ref = $mesg->entry->get_value("member", asref => 1);
print Dumper $ref;
foreach my $string (#{$ref}) {
$string =~ /CN=(.+?),.*/;
print $1 . "\n";
}
which outputs the CN's using regular expressions:
aaaa
bbbb
cccc
...
Using Dumper can I see the structure
$VAR1 = [
'CN=aaaa,OU=test,DC=test,DC=example,DC=com',
'CN=bbbb,OU=test,DC=test,DC=example,DC=com',
'CN=cccc,OU=test,DC=test,DC=example,DC=com',
So I am wondering if there is a more "LDAP" way to extract these CN's, instead of using regular expressions?
Update:
Based on Javs answer this is the solution.
my $ref = $mesg->entry->get_value("member", asref => 1);
foreach my $string (#{$ref}) {
print ldap_explode_dn($string)->[0]{CN} . "\n";
}

Answer 1

You can:
use Net::LDAP::Util qw(ldap_explode_dn);
and use it on your attribute like this:
ldap_explode_dn($mesg->entry->get_value('member'));
to get this array of hashes:
$VAR1 = [
{
'CN' => 'aaaa'
},
{
'OU' => 'test'
},
{
'DC' => 'test'
},
{
'DC' => 'example'
},
{
'DC' => 'com'
}
];

Answer 2

You do realize that CN is usually an attribute in LDAP directories?
Why not just query for the attribute CN for all returned objects? Then no parsing required.