Question

I need to store relative path of a document into a MySQL table. The problem is that when I insert a string of this form:

$urlPath ='\abc\def\fg.jpg'

into the relevant column, what I get is, I have all the slash '\' strip off, with an unknown symbol in front of all the text. So the result in the MySQL table is something like this:

'(weird symbol)abcdeffg.jpg'

As you can see, this kind of data is useless. Any idea how to fix this?

Edit: I tried $urlPath ="\\abc\\def\\fg.jpg" and $urlPath ='\\abc\\def\\fg.jpg', still I got gibberish..

Answer 1

You need to escape it twice, first for PHP because the \ character has a special meaning:

From the docs:

To specify a literal backslash before
a single quote, or at the end of the
string, double it (\)

$urlPath ='\\abc\\def\\fg.jpg';

Then you need to escape it again for MySQL because the literal string now contains ‘s which also has special meaning to MySQL.

mysql_real_escape_string() calls
MySQL’s library function
mysql_real_escape_string, which
prepends backslashes to the following
characters: \x00, \n, \r, , ‘, " and
\x1a.

$databaseUrlPath = mysql_real_escape_string($urlPath);

If you don’t want to depend on MySQL, you can use addslashes instead:

Returns a string with backslashes
before characters that need to be
quoted in database queries etc. These
characters are single quote (‘),
double quote ("), backslash () and
NUL (the NULL byte).

$databaseUrlPath = addslashes($urlPath);