I've just wasted a few hours by trying to find a bug in my code that messed up my JSON-passed-on-$_GET. I'm using fopen() so please no nagging about putting JSON in $_POST.. I finally found the answer; in my distro's /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, magic_quotes_gpc is ON. I'd like to know why, since it's being depracted anyway: http://nl.php.net/manual/en/info.configuration.php#ini.magic-quotes-gpc I'm on PHP 5.2.10-2ubuntu6.4 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.7 (cli) (built: Jan 6 2010 22:41:56) Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php