Parsing fgetcsv using tab (\t)

I'm trying to create an form where the user can upload a datafile to the server. The datafile will be txt or csv and contain multiple records. I would like the user to supply the field delimiter like (,) comma , (\t) tab or something else. The data records are then parsed using fgetcsv. The problem I'm having is trying to recover the tab character from the form post. If I print out what is received from my form I see the following \\t. I realize that the addition of the extra slash is expected, but what I don't know how to do is prepair this varable to use it in my fgetcsv argument. I've tried using stripslash but nothing seems to work for me. Strangely, if is set a variable in my processing script like: $field_terminater = "\t"; Then supply this to: $newRecord = fgetcsv($f, $size,$field_terminater) everything works fine. If I use the variable passed from my form the records are not getting parsed. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Chris