Fixing Added Slashes in WordPress

I was developing some theme options and in fields where I was going to allow the user to enter in some HTML I was noticing that whenever a link was entered in (e.g. <a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google</a>) the actual outputted markup was causing the URL to be broken due to added slashes. The output would look like the following

<a href=\"www.google.com\">Google</a>

After searching around for a solution to this I eventually found that this issue is largely related to the configuration on the server and PHP’s deprecated magic quotes. Fortunately there is a way around it. I added the following code at the top of my functions.php file and that seemed to fix the problem.

$_POST      = array_map( 'stripslashes_deep', $_POST );
$_GET       = array_map( 'stripslashes_deep', $_GET );
$_COOKIE    = array_map( 'stripslashes_deep', $_COOKIE );
$_REQUEST   = array_map( 'stripslashes_deep', $_REQUEST );