PHP stripslashes eating too many backslashes

Question

I'm trying to strip some slashes with the traditional stripslashes function and am getting odd results:

echo stripslashes('\\\\');

This gives me: \

echo stripslashes('\\\\\\\\\\\\');
// there should be 12 slashes above

This gives me: \\\ (there should be three slashes here. Even SO is being weird with it)

It's eating double the slashes >.<

However when I plug the same input to http://www.tools4noobs.com/online_php_functions/stripslashes/ the result comes out fine?

Anyone know what's going on? How can I control stripslashes' appetite and make it stop double gobbling these sloshes?

Answer 1

A backslash \ escapes one character following it. In order to print a backslash, you need two:

\\

\\\\ gives you two backslashes since each backslash escapes the one following it.

stripslashes('\\\\'); strips one backslash from the remaining two.