PHP: Enabling, disabling magic quotes

Magic Quotes is a process that auto magically 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.
Magic quotes is a controversial feature of the PHP scripting language, which was introduced to help newcomers write functioning SQL commands without requiring manual escaping. It was later described and widely misinterpreted as help to prevent inexperienced developers from writing code which is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. This feature is officially deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0, and removed in PHP 5.4 due to security concerns.