######ORIGINAL######## I've got all three Magic Quote directives turned off... When I use sql query to grab any string from a database, it still spits out the \ in front of the special characters.. Any ideas? thanks ######END ORIGINAL#### If data stored in database has escape character '\' then use stripslashes() If your want to turn off automatic escaping then turn off these directive magic_quotes_gpc magic_quotes_runtime magic_quotes_sybase -- Regards Fahad Pervaiz www.ecommerce-xperts.com (Shopping Cart, Framework for Multilingual Web Sites and Web Designs)