It is shown that, in locally compact groups satisfying the onesided version of the Wiener property introduced by Leptin, characters of closed subgroups have always continuous positive definite extensions onto the whole group. We give a quick proof that for such groups the connected component of the identity is the direct product of a compact group and a vector group. In (4], Leptin considers the following onesided version of Wiener's theorem for a locally compact group G. (L) Every closed proper left ideal in L'(G) is annihilated by nonzero positive linear functionals (or equivalently, every nonzero weak-*-closed left translation-invariant subspace of L'(G) contains nonzero positive definite functions). By reduction to some special groups Leptin shows that a connected group G satisfies property (L) if and only if G is the direct product of a compact group and a commutative group. In this note we give a short proof of the nontrivial part of that result and of some generalizations to not necessarily connected groups. In particular, if G is almost connected and satisfies property (L), then G is the semidirect product of a vector group V and a compact group K such that K acts on V effectively as a finite group. Let Coo(G) be the continuous functions on G with compact support. For f E Coo(G) let fIH denote its restriction onto the subgroup H and let ,J(y) = f(xy), x, y E G. = fG rp(x)f(x) dx is the canonical bilinear form on L'(G) x L'(G), where dx denotes a fixed left Haar measure on G. Character always means a continuous homomorphism into the circle. THEOREM 1. Let G be a locally compact group. Suppose that every closed proper left ideal in L '(G) is annihilated by nonzero positive linear functionals. Then characters of closed subgroups of G can always be extended as continuous positive definite functions of G. PROOF. Let -y be a character of a closed subgroup H of G and let IY be the right ideal in Coo(G) defined by I = {v E Coo(G); = 0 for all u E Coo(G)}. Received by the editors January 18, 1980. AMS (MOS) subject classifications (1970). Primary 43A15, 43A35, 22D05.