**Update:** This is not the right way to do this. Use WordPress functions to sanitize data. April 27, 2012

While I might be showing a bit about my PHP naivety but while working with theme options recently I found that some of my content had a just before a single quote. Now I knew it was working to escape the content but didn’t know how to get that dang out of the content. After reading up a bit more on escaping and data sanitization I found the

stripslashes();

function and guess what it does exactly what you’d think.

Remember if you’re going to echo any theme options to call

stripslashes();

on it too. So my theme options changed from

[php]
echo get_option( theme_option_name );
[php]

to

[php]
echo stripslashes( get_option( theme_option_name ) );
[php]

And we’ve killed the that were messing us up.