Searching contact records using text with an imbedded space

I've hacked Evans example to look up an internalid of a contact using their name.

It works fine as long as the search string does NOT have a space in it. If it contains a space the system throws a SQL error. I've tried putting escaped single and double quotes around the text, but the system then threw a different error about nulls.

Does anyone know how to do this?

The function I've used follows:

/* Lookup salesrep internalId by Sales Person Name */
function querySalesRepID( salesrep )
{
   var filters = new Array();
   //filters[0] = new nlobjSearchFilter( 'entityid', null, 'equalTo', salesrep, null );
   filters[0] = new nlobjSearchFilter( 'entityid', null, 'contains', salesrep, null );