I did a blog search and found this:
Note: Beware of magic_quotes! PHP’s automatic escaping of special characters with a backslash may seem like a good idea at first, but most good programmers generally agree that it (a) encourages sloppy programming that does not validate input and (b) causes annoyances in well-written code that would not occur if “magic quoting” were turned off. One such annoyance is the corruption of binary data. In the example above, if magic_quotes_runtime is on, the data that readfile() outputs may have backslashes added to it, thus corrupting the file that is sent to the user. Ideally, you should turn magic_quotes_runtime off in your php.ini file to avoid this, but if you do not have access to the configuration file, you can also use the set_magic_quotes_runtime() function (pass is the 0 (zero) integer) to turn the setting off.
Happily, the minutes of a recent PHP Developer meeting show that they have decided to abandon magic quotes in future versions (6+) of PHP. Until everyone upgrades, however, keeping the problems this feature can cause in mind can save you quite a bit of trouble and frustration.
The blog is here:
Header Tutorial Boolean Island !
Good luck
