Magic Quotes is a process that automagically escapes incoming data to the
PHP script. It's preferred to code with magic quotes off and to instead
escape the data at runtime, as needed.
When on, all ' (single-quote), "
(double quote), \ (backslash) and NULL
characters are escaped with a backslash automatically. This is identical
to what addslashes() does.
If enabled, most functions that return data from an external source,
including databases and text files, will have quotes escaped with a
backslash. Can be set at runtime, and defaults to off
in PHP.
If enabled, a single-quote is escaped with a single-quote instead of a
backslash. If on, it completely overrides
magic_quotes_gpc. Having
both directives enabled means only single quotes are escaped as
''. Double quotes, backslashes and NULL's will
remain untouched and unescaped.