My hyperlinks are “Escaping”

Oh, and another piece of information.
I looked in my link-manager.php, and found:

$link_url = stripslashes($_GET["linkurl"]);
$link_name = stripslashes($_GET["name"])

Don’t modify the stripslashes lines, they’re there for security. Also, link-manager.php is to do with the links that you can add to wordpress to go in your sidebar, for instance, they’re nothing to do with links in your posts or comments

It looks like every special character is being escaped — all the attribute values, ampersands in character references, etc.

Did you recently make any changes to any WP files, or install any plugins?

No, that’s the strang thing. I did save a post for editing that contained some backslashes. I don’t know if that would’ve done it.

Here is part of what I saved:
So, for example, if there was a user “shimon” on a linux server running apache, and my home directory was /home/shimon/ and my web home was /home/shimon/httpd/ Then, Apache would automatically make my home directory accessible via the web at https://www.domain.com/~shimon/ I’m sure you know this already.

After I saved the post, is when I noticed the hyperlinks “escaping”. Any ideas on how to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated.

I started to get this problem just now, when I first edited a comment after upgrading to WP 2.0.3. Might it be a plugin? I can’t think of anything I’m running that might do it…

Oh yeah, and I’m also getting a ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ page every time I make an edit now, which doesn’t seem like something WP would do.

Something appears to have gone through your posts and escaped every quote or double quote character. That would be what’s mucking up your hyperlinks. But as to what escaped those quotes, I have no idea.

Everything was fine yesterday. And, I haven’t added any plug-ins for at least a month or two.

Help.

My plugins:

• Bad Behavior
• Enforce www. Preference
• Gravatar
• Get Custom Field Values
• Not-To-Me
• Next-Previous Post URL
• Ping/Track/Comment Count
• Quote Comment
• WordPress Database Backup

I’ve disabled Bad Behaviour to no avail, and really can’t see what else might be doing it in that list. It’s never been a problem before now.

I’m hosted on Dreamhost and my domain is registered with GoDaddy.

(I think someone needs to sort list padding out)

It’s affecting all wordpress output — posts and comment — but not the stuff in sidebar. This is quite strange, maybe ask your hosts to see if they’ve changed the PHP installation recently.

What might be happening is that WP is using a less sophisticated escaping function based on your server settings. Sometimes web applications will do that so that they can offer security on all kinds of platforms.

But WP default behaviour is much more subtle than just sticking a slash before every special character, so this is really very strange.

Are you sure you’ve not changed anything — added a new theme, or changed a file somwhere?

No new themes or changed files in at least a month or two. I’ll contact my webhost.

Check the content in the database as well. Maybe the actual data has changed somehow, and WP isn’t adding these after the fact, but something added them to the data itself.

Does anyone else have a possible solution? I’m being hosted on a Windows box. Would migrating to a unix box be the solution?

Use the backup plugin and export your database to a file. Then look and see if the slashes are in the data itself.

They are in the data for me.

And I just noticed that rel=”nofollow” is also being added with each edit too.

My webhost tried restoring the database. Here is the response I received:

“Shimon, we restored your database from the 30th and everything was in the same condition. We went through the admin config and check all the settings and everything looks ok.

Your original database has been put back. I would recommend getting on the forums for the portal software to find the fix for this problem.”

Any help will be greatly appreciated.