People Picker Field PDFs vs. Office Documents

I was having intermittent issues with a custom alert email that I had created.  It would send most of the time, but would inexplicably not always work.
A better programmer than me would have set up exception catching that wrote to the Event Viewer but I couldn't seem to get that to work (might blog on that one later).
Alas, after much frustration I noticed that the alert emails were only firing for Office Documents (eg. Word, Excel) and not for PDFs.
This perplexed me so I opened up SharePoint Manager and browsed down to the items I was trying to render.
On comparison of the properties I was trying to render to the Alert email, I noticed that Office Documents stored People Picker user names as 15;#John Smith, while PDF documents store People Picker User names as just 15.
So my short-cut function that previously read:
       private string GetPPorLookupValue(string LongString)
        // Takes People Picker or Lookup column input in the format: 15;#John Smith
        // splits it and returns "John Smith" (to right of '#')
        {
            string[] SplitArray = LongString.Split('#');
            return SplitArray[1].ToString();
        }

Needed to be made a little bit more robust by actually referring to the User Listing in SharePoint:

        private int GetPPorLookupInteger(string LongString)
        // Takes People Picker or Lookup column input in the format: 15;#John Smith or 15
        // splits it and returns integer 15 (to left of ';', if exists)
        {
            string[] SplitArray = LongString.Split(';');
            int UserNum = Convert.ToInt32(SplitArray[0]);
            return UserNum;
        }

        private string GetUserName_ID(int UserID, SPAlertHandlerParams ahp)
        // Takes User ID as a SharePoint User ID: 12
        // returns username "John Smith"
        {
            string username = "Unknown User";
            if (!(UserID == 0))
            {
                SPWeb thisweb = new SPSite(ahp.siteUrl + ahp.webUrl).AllWebs[0];
                foreach (SPUser user in thisweb.SiteUsers)
                {
                    if (user.ID.Equals(UserID))
                    {
                        username = user.Name;
                        break;
                    }
                }
                thisweb.Dispose();
            }
            return username;
        }

string ReportUpdater = GetUserName_ID(GetPPorLookupInteger(item.Properties["ReportUpdater"].ToString()), ahp);