What are best practices for handling empty passwords in ldap_bind() for LDAP Authentication in PHP?

When using ldap_bind() for LDAP Authentication in PHP, it is important to handle empty passwords properly to avoid potential security vulnerabilities. One common approach is to check if the password is empty before attempting to bind to the LDAP server, and if it is empty, handle it accordingly, such as by returning an error message or prompting the user to enter a password.

// Check if the password is empty before attempting to bind
if(empty($password)) {
    echo "Password cannot be empty";
    exit;
}

// Perform LDAP bind with non-empty password
$ldapconn = ldap_connect("ldap.example.com");
if($ldapconn) {
    $ldapbind = ldap_bind($ldapconn, $username, $password);
    
    if($ldapbind) {
        echo "LDAP bind successful";
    } else {
        echo "LDAP bind failed";
    }
} else {
    echo "Unable to connect to LDAP server";
}