PHP keeps escaping my form's input (adding \ behind my ')

Question

So basically when I type something with an apostrophe, such as John's bike it will echo John\'s bike. The code below:

<?php
$searchname = $_POST["name"] ;
echo "$searchname";

My form uses the POST method. Is there any way to stop this?

Also to make input case insensitive how would I go about in this segment?

$searchsport = $_POST['sport'];
$sportarray = array(
"Football" => "Fb01",
"Cricket" => "ck32",
"Tennis" => "Tn43",
);
if(isset($sportarray[$searchsport])){
header("Location: ".$sportarray[$searchsport].".html");
die;
}
    //what code is needed to make the if statement work? I've looked up some weird ways such as using array_change_key_case (which I clearly don't understand).

Answer 1

This is most likely because you have magic quotes turned on, try this:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
{
  $searchname = stripslashes($_POST["name"]);
  echo "$searchname";
}
else
{
  $searchname = $_POST["name"];
  echo "$searchname";
}

In fact, you could create a function instead to do it automatically for you:

function fixIt($str)
{
    if (is_array($str))
    {
        foreach ($str as &$value)
        {
            $value = fixIt($value);
        }

        return $str;
    }
    else
    {
        return stripslashes($str);
    }    
}

And then you can simply do:

$searchname = fixIt($_POST["name"]);
echo $searchname;

Note: You can also disable the ugly magic quotes from php.ini as they are problematic and rightly deprecated and out of the future versions of PHP.