Using "trim" not working anymore?

[gopherhockey]

A person wrote a system that allowed us to update mountain bike trail conditions on a single page - displaying all our trails and a quick condition next to each one.

This was written a while ago and I was able to get it working with vb 3.0 - but now the new 3.5 broke it again.

I went in and replaced a bunch of $db calls and it seems to display just fine. However, when i click on a trail to edit the condition the script does not seem to pull out the action of "edit"

Here is the snip of code that I think is not working and how it is called:

Called via:

http://www.morcmtb.net/forums/trail.php?s=&action=edittrail&trailid=21

 // now the function used to get the info of the trail updated
function gettrailinfo (&$trailid) {
global $db;
global $trailcache;
$trailid = intval($trailid);
// if (!isset($trailcache[$trailid])) {
if ($db->trailcache[$trailid] == null) {
	$trailcache[$trailid]=$db->query_first("SELECT * FROM conditiontrail WHERE trailid='$trailid'");
}
return $trailcache[$trailid];
}
 
$action = trim($action);
// if (!isset($action) or $action=="") {
if (($db->action == null) or ($action=="")) {
$action="showtrail";
}

The action is always set to "showtrail" so somehow it seems the trim function is not changing the $action variable correctly.

Can someone help?

Its probably pretty obvious I'm no coder and its a real mess...