thanks for your reply.. i'm doing a form (form.php) 1) user comes to form.php 2) user enters details and press submit 3) details get passed to form action verify.php 4) verify.php puts all the $_POST into an array $formVars 5) verify.php session_register("formVars") 6) if there is an error, verify.php sends user back to form.php 7) form.php echos all the $formVars (i.e. details that user has previously entered) in their respective textfields, together with the error messages i need to stripslashes at Step7 because as you have mentioned in a previous post on this list, magic_quotes_gpc added slashes to all my $_POST. Thus, since I need to echo them, I need to stripslashes.. I tried echoing the $formVars without the stripslashes and I see all the slashes before the quotes and backslashes etc.. so, by right, with English characters, i still need to stripslashes. please advice. thanx thanx! ----- Original Message ----- HH > i've read the following comment on PHP.net and found it very troubling HH > because my database has Shift_JIS japanese words and my forms allow HH > japanese input as well, so, does anyone know how can I stripslashes HH > correctly when it comes to Japanese text? thanx thanx! JW > Normally you would not need to use stripslashes() anyway. What are you trying JW > to do? HH > hash at samurai dot fm HH > 01-Dec-2003 10:34 HH > Might I warn readers that they should be vary careful with the use of HH > stripslashes on Japanese text. The shift_jis character set includes a HH > number of two-byte code charcters that contain the hex-value 0x5c HH > (backslash) which will get stripped by this function thus garbling those HH > characters.