What is the significance of the backslashes in the JSON string when decoding in PHP?

When decoding a JSON string in PHP, backslashes are used to escape certain characters. This is necessary to ensure that the JSON data is properly interpreted and parsed by the PHP interpreter. To correctly decode a JSON string with backslashes in PHP, you can use the `stripslashes()` function to remove the backslashes before decoding the JSON string.

$jsonString = '{"name": "John Doe", "email": "john@example.com"}';
$decodedData = json_decode(stripslashes($jsonString), true);

print_r($decodedData);