history of 'AvoidMagicQuotes'

version 6localhost.localdomain 127.0.0.1:36214Wed Aug 5 16:10:21 2009
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+ [MarioSalzer "milky"]:
+ The 'magic_quotes' in my opinion is the most stupid thing the Zend people
+ added to PHP. Because it is a config setting, it is set differently on many
+ servers, thus making it hard to get a PHP script run equal on many systems.
+ The magic_quotes add backslashes to GET, POST and COOKIE variables to give
+ novices a chance to write 'safe' PHP database usage code without having to
+ learn programming...(!)
+ %%%
+ Yes, I'd really like to say the magic_quotes are for stupids.
+ Even if the magic_quotes are now off by default in recent PHP versions,
+ they still are a problem, because many providers still have poorly written
+ code (not managing to use addslashes() or similar before writing to database)
+ and thus enforce people also to live with the antiquatic_quotes (there is
+ the .htaccess workaround, ok, but it is not safe or always possible to use
+ it).
+ This problem for example lead to constructs like "eventually_add_slashes()"
+ functions in many projects (PhpNuke has such one for example). This slows
+ down everything and makes code unreadable - in ewiki such an
+ eventually_add_slashes() function had to be deployed around 100 times to
+ work around the antique_quotes 'feature'. So my approach was the
+ "fragments/strip_wonderful_slashes.php" include, which redecodes any
+ garbaged $_REQUEST variable.
+ %%%
+ This is a good thing, because ewiki's database code cares about adding
+ backslashes before sending commands to the database - and in fact PHP's
+ magic_quotes sense of adding quotes wasn't even capable of doing it
+ correctly, because different databases (ADODB) use different escape chars!
+ For an bad example of problems with magic_quotes just see the
+ sourceforge.net site - their software is also not aware enough of their own
+ PHP interpreter having the trouble_quotes enabled, so you\\\\\'ll often see
+ backslashes appear before quotes, often you\\\\\\\\\\'ll see a long line of
+ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ backslashes, where you wouldn\\\\\\\\\\\'t expect
+ (they also have problems with \newlines, but that\\\'s another story ;)

version 5home page (localhost.localdomain 127.0.0.1:39211)Mon Aug 3 07:06:34 2009
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version 4vxidefau kmdtw (89-96-211-199.ip14.fastwebnet.it 89.96.211.199:59794)Sun Apr 1 17:25:07 2007
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+ dycz flvrqnyh cqpoxbey jsmrbfivd abesvhjiy yfjo cyngpa

version 3c-66-30-241-206.hsd1.ma.comcast.net 66.30.241.206:1254Sat Oct 22 12:11:39 2005

version 2px1cv.gv.shawcable.net 24.64.223.203:43346Sun Sep 4 22:28:42 2005

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