addslashes does NOT make your input safe for use in a database query! It only escapes according to what PHP defines, not what your database driver defines. Any use of this function to escape strings for use in a database is likely an error - mysql_real_escape_string, pg_escape_string, etc, should be used depending on your underlying database as each database has different escaping requirements. In particular, MySQL wants \n, \r and \x1a escaped which addslashes does NOT do. Therefore relying on addslashes is not a good idea at all and may make your code vulnerable to security risks. I really don't see what this function is supposed to do.