\\\\r\\\\n\\\\r\\\\n Characters appearing after text inserted into a form in PHP

Question

I have a form that processes text like this:

$group_description = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($_POST['group_description']));

$insert_group_sql =  'INSERT INTO table_name( group_description ) 
VALUES ( "'.$group_description.'" ') ';

And another page that outputs the db results like this:

$group_description = $row['group_description'];

//Convert all urls to links
$group_description = preg_replace('#([\s|^])(www)#i', '$1http://$2', $group_description);
$pattern = '#((http|https|ftp|telnet|news|gopher|file|wais):\/\/[^\s]+)#i';
$replacement = '<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>';
$group_description = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $group_description);

$group_description = str_replace(array('\r\n', '\n\r'), '<br />',$group_description);

/* Convert all E-mail matches to appropriate HTML links */
$pattern = '#([0-9a-z]([-_.]?[0-9a-z])*@[0-9a-z]([-.]?[0-9a-z])*\\.';
$pattern .= '[a-wyz][a-z](fo|g|l|m|mes|o|op|pa|ro|seum|t|u|v|z)?)#i';
$replacement = '<a href="mailto:\\1">\\1</a>';
$group_description = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $group_description);

What I ended up with was this page: http://www.comehike.com/hikes/hiking_group.php?hiking_group_id=54

And I am not too sure how this user got the \\r\\n characters to get in there:)

Any idea where things went wrong? I use a MySQL database if that is important. Thanks!

Answer 1

Read up on PHP magic quotes and then think about upgrading php version.