I see what you're saying. I tried it with the below example, and it returned 1 for placevalue of first tab.

DECLARE @REALNAME varchar(255)

SET @REALNAME = 'Ricki Ricardo'--where the leading space is a single tab space

select LEN(@realname)

select len(RTRIM(ltrim(@realname)))

select charindex(char(9),@realname, 0)

But, in my case it's not a tab. The position value returned was 0. What other character could the white space be?