What role does the stripslashes function play in preventing unintended characters in PHP?
The stripslashes function in PHP is used to remove backslashes (\) from a string. This is particularly useful in preventing unintended characters, such as escape characters, from being included in user input data. By using stripslashes, you can ensure that the data being processed does not contain any unwanted characters that could potentially lead to security vulnerabilities or unexpected behavior in your application.
$user_input = $_POST['user_input']; // assuming user input is received via POST method
$cleaned_input = stripslashes($user_input);
// now $cleaned_input can be safely used in your application without unintended characters