Passing special characters in hidden fields

Hi; I'm curremtly writing an installation/configuration wizard for an existing PHP application. I have a hidden field with the value " ' ". But everytime the page reloads, it adds a " / " infront of it.... I tried to use htmlspecialcharacters and stripslashes but I didn't manage to make t work. Not only it must display ok on the screen in case the user goes forward a step and comes back, it's vaue must also be ok as I will use this value later in the installation. Has anyone experienced this before? Thanks Serdar ssn@elca.ch