how to escape search for an entry in a table that has a single quotation

I'm trying to grab data from a database where the entry has a single quotation and then re-search based on that.

Basically, I grab the entry: michael's car.

But, I want to go back into the table and search for everything that has: michael's car.

It seems that PHP always escapes the entries once I grab them from the database. Is there a way to avoid this?

If you're using MySQL, use mysql_real_escape_string() to deal with quotes and other problematic characters:

$sql = "SELECT col1 FROM table WHERE col2 = '" . mysql_real_escape_string($value) . "'";

thanks