I am genuinly curious: how did you fix it? Did you remove the spaces first and then tried to use substring / trimming with proper testing done, or did you just implement it in place? I have faced similar dilemmas in the past, but I usually go with "put out the fire, then find the correct solution" approach.
Implement in place to put the fire out. Pushed to half the web servers, made sure it fixed the problem, then rolled it out the rest. Coding under fire :P
To clarify the "comment" was not a Stack Overflow comment, but rather a comment in a code block inside a question.