security magicquotes - Disabling Magic Quotes

Disabling Magic Quotes

The magic_quotes_gpc directive may only be disabled at the system level, and not at runtime. In otherwords, use of ini_set() is not an option.

Example #1 Disabling magic quotes server side

An example that sets the value of these directives to Off in php.ini. For additional details, read the manual section titled How to change configuration settings.

 ; Magic quotes ;  ; Magic quotes for incoming GET/POST/Cookie data. magic_quotes_gpc = Off  ; Magic quotes for runtime-generated data, e.g. data from SQL, from exec(), etc. magic_quotes_runtime = Off  ; Use Sybase-style magic quotes (escape ' with '' instead of \'). magic_quotes_sybase = Off

If access to the server configuration is unavailable, use of .htaccess is also an option. For example:

 php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off

In the interest of writing portable code (code that works in any environment), like if setting at the server level is not possible, here's an example to disable magic_quotes_gpc at runtime. This method is inefficient so it's preferred to instead set the appropriate directives elsewhere.

Example #2 Disabling magic quotes at runtime

 <?php
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    $process = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE, &$_REQUEST);
    while (list($key, $val) = each($process)) {
        foreach ($val as $k => $v) {
            unset($process[$key][$k]);
            if (is_array($v)) {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = $v;
                $process[] = &$process[$key][stripslashes($k)];
            } else {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = stripslashes($v);
            }
        }
    }
    unset($process);
}
?>