[wp-hackers] Magic quotes "on" forever?

[Stephen Rider]

On May 6, 2010, at 1:32 PM, John Blackbourn wrote:

> The general concensus (Ryan, Lloyd, Dion) was the same as what Westi
> and Otto have just mentioned, that it would be great to remove the
> magic quote emulation but the issues with backward compatibility are
> too great. There are simply too many plugins out there that expect
> escaped data that it would be asking for trouble.
> 
> Additionally, removing magic quote emulation would mean that plugins
> would have to go back to checking for get_magic_quotes_gpc() (or a
> similar WordPress function) and the whole reason WordPress emulates
> magic quotes in the first place is to avoid this. So maybe we're stuck
> with this forever?

This idea is only half-formed, but could we introduce something like maybe_slash()/maybe_unslash functions so that WP itself decides when to add or remove slashes?  Get plugins using that and eventually we could phase out magic quotes.

Stephen