How to store escaped characters in MySQL and display them in php?

Question

For example I want to store the String "That's all". MySQL automatically escapes the ' character. How do I echo that String from the database using php but remove the \ in front of escaped characters like \' ? I would also like to preserve other formatting like new lines and blank spaces.

Answer 1

Have you tried stripslashes(), regarding the linebreaks just use the nl2br() function.

Example:

$yourString = "That\'s all\n folks";
$yourString = stripslashes(nl2br($yourString));
echo $yourString;

Note: \\ double slashes will turn to \ single slashes

---

You should probably setup your own function, something like:

$yourString = "That\'s all\n folks";

function escapeString($string) {
    return stripslashes(nl2br($string));
}

echo escapeString($yourString);

There are also several good examples in the nl2br() docs

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Edit 2

The reason your are seeing these is because mysql is escaping line breaks, etc. I am guessing you are using mysql_* functions. You should probably look into mysqli or PDO.

Here is an example:

$yourString = "That's all
 folks";
echo mysql_escape_string($yourString);

Outputs:

That\'s all\r\n folks