[SOLVED] What is the right way to print escaped strings, and to hide backslashes on users end?

What is the right way to print escaped strings, and to hide backslashes on users end?

I'm building a website using Laravel 4. I'm using triple "{" while printing data from the database, or data that can be user manipulated but I have a dilemma here. When special characters are used they are escaped with a "\", but I don't want the "\" to appear on the site.

So my question is how to print these strings the right way? I know I can use stripslashes to remove the "\", but is this safe? The slashes are added there for a reason so just stripping them would't be a problem? Is there a better/safer way to achieve this?

Note: I'm not asking for a Laravel approach only, I'm also open to pure php suggestions.

Thanks.

Solution

I found the cause of this after all. In the public folder of this website we also have wordpress installed to be used as a CMS for our blog section of the website. It seems that WordPress was altering the $_POST/$_GET variables.

The solution for this was to capture the $_GET, $_POST and $_REQUEST variables in a temporary array before the wordpress is initialized in public/index.php and reassign them the values from that array after wordpress is initialized.

$tmp = array($_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST);

/**
*   Include wordpress
*/
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require __DIR__.'/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php';

list($_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST) = $tmp;