posting text that contains a '

I've recently noticed that when i post text from a textarea field to a text file that ' (single quotes) are written as /' if i have the textarea field include the text that was posted to the file, it displays /' for all the single quotes. if i post the textarea field again, it posts the /' as //'. this cycle continues endlessly. I have compensated for this by sending the output through a preg_replace to get rid of all the backslashes. The reason I am writing is because this entire problem has only started happening recently. I used to be able to post textarea field data and recall it back into the textarea field verbatim character per character. What is causing this to change? I am running apache 1.3.20 on a linux system with php 4.2.1 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com