trying to parse ldif file using python-ldap ldifparser

Update

You appear to be using a very old version of the python-ldap module. Version 2.4.15 was released over seven years ago. The current release is 3.3.1, which is what you get if you pip install python-ldap.

Python 2 itself went end-of-life in Janurary 2020, and version 2.7.5 was released back in 2013.

The software you're working with is very old and has bugs that were fixed in more recent versions. You should upgrade.

As I mentioned in comments, I'm not able to reproduce the behavior you've described. If I put your sample LDIF content into cluster1.ldif, I see:

>>> from ldif import LDIFParser, LDIFRecordList
>>> parser = LDIFRecordList(open("cluster1.ldif", "r"))
>>> parser.parse()
>>> for dn, entry in parser.all_records:
...     print(dn)
...     print(entry)
...
cn=abc, cn=def, cn="dc=grid,dc=mycompany,dc=com", cn=tree, cn=config
{'changetype': [b'add'], 'objectClass': [b'top   '], 'cn': [b'abc'], 'description': [b'myserver']}
>>>

You asked about an alternative to use LDIFRecordList. You can of course write your own handler by subclassing LDIFParser, but the underlying LDIF parsing is still going to be the same. That would look something like:

from ldif import LDIFParser, LDIFRecordList


class MyParser(LDIFParser):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.records = []
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def handle(self, dn, entry):
        self.records.append((dn, entry))


parser = MyParser(open("cluster1.ldif", "r"))
parser.parse()
for dn, entry in parser.records:
    print(dn)
    print(entry)

...but that's really just re-implementing LDIFRecordList, so I don't think you obtain any benefit from doing this.

I'm using python 3.9.6 and python-ldap 3.3.1. If you continue to see different behavior, would you update your question to include the output of python -c 'import sys; import ldap; print("\n".join([sys.version, lda p.__version__]))'

If I understand right, you want something like this:

#!/usr/bin/python

from ldif import LDIFParser
from sys import argv

class myParser( LDIFParser ):

   def handle( self, dn, entry ):
        print( "DN:", dn )
        print( "CT:", entry['changetype'], "\n" )

parser = myParser( open( argv[1] ) )
parser.parse()

LDIFParser.handle() method is invoked for every DN of your LDIF and in it you have direct access to DN (dn variable) and AVPs (entry variable), latter being a dictionary of attribute names with associated values as byte arrays.

Does that help?