how to handle inserting special characters into a mysql field

I'm going to be inserting data from a PHP form into a mysql field. The data could contain special characters like < > ' " \ /, etc. How do I handle that? just $data = addslashes(htmlspecialchars($data)); before the insert query? because later on the data will be read back from the mysql db and I don't want it to contain a special character that would break the PHP script.