php is adding the characters that are not required

benjy

i have two qutestions really. the first is
i have this html form that is used to collect data into a PHP variable and printed into a txt file. but when a user puts one of these -> " <- (yuuno those inverted coomans or something) into the form a "\" is put before it.
so if a user typed
"hello"
is comes out as
\"hello\"
i know WHY it happens. but is there anyway to stop it.

my second question (which i know is completely different) but the CGI guestbook called "megabook" uses a .db file, what are these files called and where can i lern for php to interact with it?

cgraz

you have magic quotes set to on. All quotes, apostrophes, and other characters that need to be escaped are escaped automatically. Use stripslashes() to strip the slashes, or turn off magic quotes if it's your server.

Cgraz

benjy

so i should go something like this

<? stripslashes( $variable ); ?>

and THEN write it into the txt file?

cgraz

yeah, give that a shot. Obviously, certain characters need to be escaped for a reason. If not, php gets confused. For example

$var = "hello "bob", how are you";

PHP gets confused w/all the quotes and produces a parse error. The variable would need to have the quotes escaped

$var = "hello \"bob\", how are you";

If you strip the slashes before writing, it should work without any error messages, however I'm not positive. Give it a try and see what happens (but as far as the use of the function, you've got it down right).

Cgraz