URL Request parameters not detected in PHP for bingbot - php

Question

I have a bizarre thing happening, bingbot is spidering my website, and one such URL looks like this:
https://xxxxx/programme.php?action=view&id=2233
In my code, I have this function:
function getNumericValue($value) {
if (is_numeric($value)) {
return mysql_escape_string($value);
}
if (isset($_GET[$value])) {
if (!is_numeric($_GET[$value])) {
echo "$value must be numeric.";
exit;
}
return mysql_escape_string($_GET[$value]);
} if (isset($_POST[$value])) {
if (!is_numeric($_POST[$value])) {
echo "$value must be numeric.";
exit;
}
return mysql_escape_string($_POST[$value]);
} else {
echo "Please specify a $value";
debug("Please specify a $value - " .$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].' : '.$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].' : '.print_r($_POST, true).' USERID: '.getUserid());
exit;
}
}
The debug() function emails me errors every 15 minutes, and when microsoft spider the site, I am getting: Please specify a id - /programme.php?action=view&id=2233 : msnbot-NewsBlogs/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) : Array ( ) USERID: -1
You can see from the URL that it has an id, but PHP is totally ignoring it. It is fine for google spiders.
Any ideas what could be happening, and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Wild guess - maybe there's an extra space after id number and is_numeric('2233 ') returns false. Try trimming the value taken from $_GET/$_POST (or $_REQUEST for that matter):
function getNumericValue($value) {
if (is_numeric($value)) {
return mysql_escape_string($value);
}
if (isset($_REQUEST[$value])) {
$request_value = trim($_REQUEST[$value]);
if (!is_numeric($request_value)) {
echo "$value must be numeric.";
exit;
}
return mysql_escape_string($request_value);
}
echo "Please specify a $value";
debug("Please specify a $value - " .$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].' : '.$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].' : '.print_r($_POST, true).' USERID: '.getUserid());
exit;
}