Peculiar Puzzle – Missing GET Parameters

over the last week I have been seeing an odd error usually just once or twice per day out of the 10,000+ requests per day that hit my django web app backend for the iPhone apps.

It appears as though the GET parameters get dropped and I can’t explain why. Hoping someone out there has some suggestions.

The code in my iPhone apps check in to get data from the webserver. This is new content for the app. For each request it needs to have a parameter to determine which app is requesting the data – since there are a few using the same server.

The app code calls a statically defined url string like “http://appserver.com/app_data?app_id=aiuwbev”

However, about one in every 10,000 requests that come though create an exception because that app_id is not present.

The other bits seem to be on the mark. They don’t seem to be coming from a web browser manually.

So the most likely culprit is either that some small number of users are doing something sneaky, or there is a bug somewhere.

I’m curious if anyone has seen this issue before, or knows what might be causing it.

Edit:
Solved – the problem was due to the string encoding on iOS side of things. Needed to enforce a utf8 encoding for all urls.