Magic Quotes is a process that automagically escapes incoming data to the PHP script. It's preferred to code with magic quotes off and to instead escape the data at runtime, as needed.
When on, all ' (single-quote), " (double quote), \ (backslash) and NULL characters are escaped with a backslash automatically. This is identical to what addslashes() does.
There are three magic quote directives:
Affects HTTP Request data (GET, POST, and COOKIE). Cannot be set at runtime, and defaults to on in PHP.
See also get_magic_quotes_gpc().
If enabled, most functions that return data from an external source, including databases and text files, will have quotes escaped with a backslash. Can be set at runtime, and defaults to on in PHP.
See also set_magic_quotes_runtime() and get_magic_quotes_runtime().
If enabled, a single-quote is escaped with a single-quote instead of a backslash. If on, it completely overrides magic_quotes_gpc. Having both directives enabled means only single quotes are escaped as ''. Double quotes, backslashes and NULL's will remain untouched and unescaped.
See also ini_get() for retrieving its value.