Reply To: Regression: Backslashes stripped in WYSIWYG

• figureone

• September 17, 2013 at 2:14 pm

Hey @elliot,

I understand server setups are varied, so lets not waste any more time trying to tackle the problem by identifying which ones have problems with magic quotes.

Instead, let me show you how ACF doesn’t work on one of the most common server setups, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (it’s the standard image on Amazon EC2 and linode). Here are some steps I took to reproduce the ACF bug under this setup:

* I created a test VM environment (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, PHP 5.3.10, MySQL 5.5.32).
You can do this easily in vagrant–Ubuntu 12.04 Precise 32bit is the default vagrant box. Instructions on setting up a vagrant virtual machine on your computer is available here:
http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/

* I installed a vanilla copy of WordPress 3.6.1 and ACF 4.2.2.

* I created a new ACF Field Group, and added one Wysiwyg Editor field to the field group. I left all defaults as-is, so the field group appears on all posts on the site.

* I then edited the sample post included with WordPress (“Hello world!”), and added the following content to the new ACF field:
Hi! This is ACF content. It just might strip out \ backslashes, which could be \nasty.

* I then saved the post (by clicking “Update”), and confirmed that the backslashes (“\”) were removed from the above text.

In short, I think you haven’t heard about this issue from others because the backslash is a lightly used character, and tracing this issue back to ACF is time consuming. But any data loss issue should be treated seriously.

The easiest solution for you, I think, is to implement another option in the Settings panel for a Wysiwyg field. This setting would simply toggle whether stripslashes_deep() gets called or not. If we do it that way, we don’t have to use get_magic_quotes_gpc() at all, so you shouldn’t get any reports from other users on older PHP setups. This option would default to the current behavior if you wish, so it doesn’t change the default behavior, but it would give me and any others running newer PHP setups the ability to prevent ACF from haphazardly removing backslashes from all ACF wysiwyg content.

I can provide the pull request with this code, so you don’t have to take extra time writing it. I simply need some sort of assurance that you’ll implement it before I take the time to write the code.

Cheers,
-Paul
PhD Information Science
College of Education
University of Hawaii