str_replace oddity

I am using str_replace to strip double quotes. $string = 'This string has "quotes" in it'; $string = str_replace('"', '', $string); this seems to work, yet when I put the $string into mysql, it uses backslashes to escape where the quotes were. The double-quotes are gone, yet it still escapes the 'ghost' where they were. I even tried str_replace(array("\x8c", "\x9c", "'", '"'), '', $string) but the ghost remains and mysql continues to escape them. I check the charsets, and the db is Latin-1 and the sting is ISO-8859-1 Any thoughts on this would be most graciously accepted. Kind regards kevin -- "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."