Wrong LDAP search filters?

Today, I tried to replace the deprecated LDAP functions, related to this post. As I have never did anything with LDAP (new skill ;) ), first I wanted to get familiar with it. Google Code Search helped a lot, however, it turned out that the problem might not be related to the deprecated functions, because the LDAP API developers still maintain them, for backward compatibility. What I did in this context was:

• Created the ldap_facade module, to hide the calling details of the deprecated functions (which function is called in fact, some of the always-the-same LDAP API function parameters, etc.).
• Added the ldap_facade_init and ldap_facade_search functions only, and left the rest (may be added later, if change is needed there).
  

To check if I am able to connect to the LDAP server, and execute the search appeared in the log attached to the bug, I installed the Apache LDAP browser plugin for Eclipse, created a connection to the server, and copied the search filter. Here, I made an observation: the plugin did not accept the search filter, because it started with a space...

I checked it in the code, the hard-wired template filters really started with a single space. If I removed it, then the test command went further, and tried to do some SRM operations.

So, the questions:

• Is it true that the LDAP search filter string cannot start with a white space?
• If it is true, then is it a bug in the code? Other filters start with space as well.
• If it is a bug, why could not we see them so far?