I'm having issues escaping/stripping strings with PHP/MySQL - there always seems to be redundant slashes.

Let's take the following string as an example:

<span style="text-decoration:underline;">underline</span>


When adding a string to the database, I'm escaping it with mysql_real_escape_string() and the following gets stored in the database (EDIT: checked this by querying the database directly with mysql app):

<span style=\\\"text-decoration:underline;\\\">underline</span>


When reading back out of the database, I'm passing the string through stripslashes() and the following is returned:

<span style=\"text-decoration:underline;\">underline</span>


Since the quotes are still escaped, it breaks the html and the text is not underlined.

  1. Why is mysql_real_escape_string() adding three slashes, and stripslashes() removing two slashes? I would expect them both to add/remove one slash.
  2. How can I prevent this from happening?
  3. Am I approaching this the correct way?
php mysql-real-escape-string stripslashes
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