POST with textarea

[Butthead]

I have a text box that gets read into a variable called $_POST[message], the problem is, if someone puts a quote in the text box it's printed as being escaped. So "Hello World." becomes \"Hello World.\". Is there a way to prevent this?

[swr]

The slashes are added by the "magic quotes gpc" option. Turn that off and the slashes will go away.

Alternatively, use [man]stripslashes[/man] to reverse the effect.

The slashes are to prevent SQL injection attacks (among other things). Be sure to understand how those attacks work if you are going to remove slashes.

[Butthead]

stripslashes was what I was looking for thank you!

[xblue]

just a note:

if the server settings may be changed (i.e. if the server is not under your control), it may be worth considering to make it work with both possible scenarios, like

if(get_magic_quotes_gpc())
{
   $_POST = array_map("stripslashes", $_POST);
}

o you may loose backslashes that were actually meant to be there (though this is less likely than quotes - actually it may be the harder to detect).

credits to ddenicola who posted this in the user contributed notes at php.net, I struggled with this quite a lot and found his/her solution very helpful.

[Butthead]

I tested with slashes and they were no problem. They were displayed jsut fine. Only the one added by magic quotes were removed.