How do I run a ldap query using R?

Question

I want to make a query against a LDAP directory of how employees are distributed in departments and groups...

Something like: "Give me the department name of all the members of a group" and then use R to make a frequency analysis, but I can not find any examples on how to connect and run a LDAP query using R.

RCurl seems to have some kind of support ( http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCurl/index.html ):

Additionally, the underlying implementation is robust and extensive, supporting FTP/FTPS/TFTP (uploads and downloads), SSL/HTTPS, telnet, dict, ldap, and also supports cookies, redirects, authentication, etc.

But I am no expert in R and have not been able to find a single example using RCurl (or any other R library) to do this..

Right now I am using CURL like this to obtain the members of a group:

curl "ldap://ldap.replaceme.com/o=replaceme.com?memberuid?sub?(cn=group-name)"

Anyone here knows how to do the same in R with RCurl?

Answer 1

Found the answer myself:

First run this commands to make sure RCurl is installed (as described in http://www.programmingr.com/content/webscraping-using-readlines-and-rcurl/ ):

install.packages("RCurl", dependencies = TRUE)
library("RCurl")

And then user getURL with an ldap URL (as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2255.txt although I couldn't understand it until I read http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19396-01/817-7616/ldurl.html and saw ldap[s]://hostname:port/base_dn?attributes?scope?filter):

getURL("ldap://ldap.replaceme.com/o=replaceme.com?memberuid?sub?(cn=group-name)")