When I create the array and strings that goes into several LDAP calls, I typically type:

$dataA[$key] = utf8_encode($value);
$searchbase = utf8_encode($dn);
etc.

This worked fine in PHP3, but in PHP4 the data transmitted is (sometimes?) corrupt as it reaches the LDAP Server. I circumvented the problem by using the trim() function on every string value (also in the arrays), before passing them to the PHP LDAP functions.

E.g.
o=Company Sigma becomes o=Company Sigma??*9 
st=Oresund becomes st=Oresund2??*09:3 

The appended characters seems to be arbitrary binary values. When trying to retrieve one of the nodes holding these values, an LDAP "Decoding error" is returned.

Config line:
./configure \
--with-apache=../apache_1.3.12 \
--with-pgsql \
--with-mhash \
--with-ldap \
--disable-short-tags \
--enable-track-vars \
--enable-memory-limit=yes