For anoyne that got a chance to listen to the first edition of 'Ask Chris' from the Pro-PHP Podcast, Chris has backed up some of the comments made in there with this new post over on his blog, mentioning when's the best time to use stripslashes.

No, I'm not talking about Star Wars. The first episode of Ask Chris is now online. In this episode, I am asked about a comment I made during my talk at PHP West. During the talk, someone asked when stripslashes() should be used, and I said it should never be used. I was being a bit cheeky, but I thought it was funny. :-)

I went a bit further, noting that if you ever find yourself removing the escaping of something, you've probably screwed up somewhere. I didn't substantiate this remark (because it was tangential to the current topic), so many people have, understandably, questioned it.

So, to explain things further, he illustrates with a few SQL statements and a note that sometimes you want the slashes in there, and using stripslashes could distort the data...