i think that when php posts a form, it automatically [man]addslashes[/man] the form data - to avoid syntax errors. Also, when reading data from a database the slashes are automatically [man]stripslashes[/man]
basically, both " and ' are used as string delimiters by php (and many other languages). if you have a string
"adam's here"
then there is the problem that the language will parse the string as
"adam"
which leaves some text "s here" in the program, which the parser can't make sense of. So to tell the parser that that ' doesn't represent the end of a string, we prefix it with a \
"adam\'s here"
Then there are other escaped characters - which are used to represent system characters. \r represents a carriage return and \n represents a newline - these are the two most important
if you do the following php
echo "<BR>\n<BR>";
and run the script, the html source will show
<BR>
<BR>
because you put a newline (\n) in the text. This makes the source easier to read, as it won't all appear on one line
adam
