[CLUE-Tech] PHP escaping characters

[Jed S. Baer]

Greetings.

I have this "one-script" php generated HTML form. Pretty simple stuff.
What happens is that if I enter a name in the name text field, like
"Duncan O'Malley", it gets changed to "Duncan O\'Malley".

It happens regardless of whether I do a get or post method. I thought any
special characters were supposed to just get URL encoded, and magically
renoberated back to whatever they were on either end.

I tried fixing this using the htmlspecialchars function, but that didn't
work, presumably because the apostrophe has already been escaped at that
point.

The form is contained in a string variable in the script:

$xform = "
// snip
<input type=\"text\" name=\"yourname\"
 size=\"40\" maxlength=\"40\"
 value=\"$yourname \"
>
// snip
";

so the first time it's called, $yourname is blank, and if the form gets
redisplayed because of validation errors, what was there is retained.

TIA
jed
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