What are the potential pitfalls of manually adding and removing slashes in PHP code?

Manually adding and removing slashes in PHP code can lead to errors and inconsistencies in the code, as it is easy to miss or incorrectly place the slashes. To avoid this, you can use built-in PHP functions like addslashes() and stripslashes() to properly handle escaping and unescaping characters in strings. 

// Example of using addslashes() and stripslashes() to properly handle escaping and unescaping characters in PHP code

// Manually adding slashes
$unescapedString = "This is a string with 'single' and \"double\" quotes";
$escapedString = addslashes($unescapedString); // Adds slashes before single and double quotes

echo $escapedString; // Output: This is a string with \'single\' and \"double\" quotes

// Manually removing slashes
$escapedString = "This is a string with \\'single\\' and \\\"double\\\" quotes";
$unescapedString = stripslashes($escapedString); // Removes slashes before single and double quotes

echo $unescapedString; // Output: This is a string with 'single' and "double" quotes

Keywords

slashes PHP code addslashes stripslashes security vulnerability

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