What directive is causing this?

Question

Hello all,

I have moved my site to a new server and I have noticed strings returned from the database that have quotes in them are automatically escaped with a backslash, so I have this appearing in my HTML out output \' where ever there is a quote - I am wondering what is causing this, a PHP directive?

What directives in PHP or anything else would cause this?

Thanks all for any help

Answer 1

Magic Quotes http://php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.php

When on, all ' (single-quote), " (double quote), \ (backslash) and NULL characters are escaped with a backslash automatically. This is identical to what addslashes() does.

Disabling:

Example #1 Disabling magic quotes server side

An example that sets the value of these directives to Off in php.ini. For additional details, read the manual section titled How to change configuration settings.

; Magic quotes
;

; Magic quotes for incoming GET/POST/Cookie data.
magic_quotes_gpc = Off

; Magic quotes for runtime-generated data, e.g. data from SQL, from exec(), etc.
magic_quotes_runtime = Off

; Use Sybase-style magic quotes (escape ' with '' instead of \').
magic_quotes_sybase = Off

If access to the server configuration is unavailable, use of .htaccess is also an option. For example: php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off

Answer 2

better use: var_dump(ini_get('magic_quotes_gpc'));

this will result in: string(1) "1" if enabled, or string(0) "" if disabled.

im suspecting you'll get the first option displayed in your script so you'd probably want to include this:

php_value magic_quotes_gpc off
php_value magic_quotes_runtime off

in a .htaccess file. Assuming your host allows override by .htaccess this should be fine.