Using PHP variables with HTML

Hi,

I’ve set up an options page for my theme in the admin area. On this page I would like to offer the user to save code in a textarea input form. I will then insert that code into a post.

I’ve set up the form, no frills, standard, but when I save HTML the form seems to be saving it with extra backslashes before each quote mark and hence the code is not printing properly in the front end…

Any ideas what may be causing this? Do php variables automatically do this? Is there a wordaround?

Thanks