slash trouble when editing text

I wrote a small script that creates a link to all the .php and .txt files in a given directory. When one of these links is clicked, it brings up another window with the files contents inserted into a text area. From there the user can edit the text file then click a submit button to make the changes. The problem is whenever the file contains quotes, when the file gets edited it puts a slash in front of every quote. Like this. // original .txt file "these are quotes" Then when the submit buttons is clicked, the file looks like this: // edited .txt file \"these are quotes\" If submit is pressed again, then it will look like this: // twice edited file \\"these are quotes\\" Does anyone know how I can avoid this from happening? Thanks. Matt