Have you ever heard about magic quotes? Today I have just realize why it must be called magic quotes. My objective was just to install phpMyAdmin on CentOS 4.2. I supposed it should be done in an hour. However, I stucked on generating the configuration file, config.inc.php. The symptom are as follows.

• I could add a server.
• I could save the configuration file.
• Sadly, I couldn’t load the configuration file.
• When activated this configuration file, the error message immediately displayed like it couldn’t contact local MySQL instance via unix socket.
• It turned out that phpMyAdmin couldn’t read config.inc.php, so I directly modified config.default.php.
• phpMyAdmin worked just fine to connect to remote MySQL instant.
• Unfortunately, all single quote characters retrieved from MySQL are escaped by backslash, e.g., \’abc\’ instead of ’abc’ usually.

After investigated for the whole day, I found the problem caused by incorrect configuration in php.ini. Yes, it is magic quotes. That’s why it is called magic quotes. There are 3 magic quotes options;

• magic_quotes_gpc = On
• magic_quotes_runtime = Off
• magic_quotes_sybase = Off

In my case, the problem is magic_quotes_runtime, the correct value should be Off. Unfortunately, it was set to On in my machine. After adjust this value, everything works just fine.

Just a side note, GPC stands for Get/Post/Cookie. So magic_quotes_gpc means that all values extracted from Get/Post/Cookie are automatically quoted.

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