frigging back slash escaping!@$%!!

Anon

What is the deal with these damn backslashes causing me so much greaf?

Can anyone quickly tell me the corect syntax for this?

$prodname = ereg_replace ("\", "|", $prodname); // doesn't work

$prodname = ereg_replace ('\', "|", $prodname); // doesn't work

What does?

Anon

Well, I'll assume you want to replace all backslashes in a string with bars... Well, because this is a simple string replace, I don't recommend using regular expressions. I suggest using str_replace().

So...
$mystring = "This is \a\ string \that\ has \backslashes\ in it!";
$mystring = str_replace("\","|",$mystring);

Or, if you absolutely must use regular expressions:
$mystring = preg_replace("~\\~","|",$mystring);
or
$mystring = ereg_replace("\\","|",$mystring);

Hope this helps!

-Josh B

Anon

try $prodname = ereg_replace ('[\]', '|', $prodname);

Anon

Wow.. you guys are great! Why the heck do back slashes behave that way? As in..

$mystring = ereg_replace("\\","|",$mystring);

I had no clue that I would have to enter 4 back slashes just to mach one... why is it that you have escape it that many times?

Anon

It's called "Magic Quotes". PHP escapes characters the DB might not like with a '\'. This way if a special char posted from a website, etc, is to be inserted / updated into a DB the query won't die. The character will "literally" be inserted into the db with the rest of the string.

You can turn it off at runtime with set_magic_quotes_runtime()

Or add / stripslashes with the
addslashes() and stripslashes() functions.

Cheers,
Sean.

frigidman

Yeah, I found that turning ALL settings of magic_quotes_x to OFF, made life so much easier with dealing with any form data, passed vars, and the like.

Only real place you need the dang escaped chars, is in sql with db actions. I found it far more easy to adopt doing "$somevar_q = addslashes($somevar);" right before a sql statement creation... so none of the original vars would get screwed up with slashes.

Works out good, and I never have to worry "does this damn var have some stupid escaped chars in it from that pathetic magic_quotes crap?".

I breath easier when coding now.