Christopher Jones has posted about an update to the development for PHP 5.3 that makes escaping SQL even easier in scripts - NOWDOCS.

Escaping quotes or other meta characters in SQL can be painful unless you get lucky with your quoting style. [...] Even with PHP's "Heredoc" syntax something will need escaping, but with PHP 5.3's new "Nowdoc" syntax no escaping is needed.

The only difference between HEREDOC and NOWDOC is that the initial keyword (like the first END in this statement: <<<'END' text here END;) that can make worrying about complex quoting rules a thing of the past.