storing bzcompressed data in MySQL

I've got an automated system that will be storing text files of up to about 20k. In peak times, I expect to have two to three million of these text files "on demand", though in reality they'll be expired *way* more often than they're referenced. To save space, I'd like to store the text using bzcompress(), but when I use a construct like this: $q = "INSERT INTO item (bztext) ('" . bzcompress($text,9) . "')"; But running the query gets my mysql_error() results of You have an error in your SQL syntax near '$¢icÍeÖ3 Ò­mX®"" EèÓÊÊA*"("M0¤´è,¨ ÚP#®ïsÂüÞ´+Ò÷jW6%e VdÁ' at line 2 It seems that the bzcompressed data includes single (and double) quotes. Is the solution here to encode everything using htmlspecialchars(), thus using extra resources for both inbound and outbound data? Or will it suffice to str_replace("'","''",bzcompress($text,9)) ? Are there other things that will break? Or is there some other preferred method to ensure accurate storage of blocks of binary data? Thanks. :) -- Paul Chvostek <paul@it.ca> Operations / Abuse / Whatever it.canada, hosting and development http://www.it.ca/