PROBLEM: I needed to find a way to “re-process” text a user enters for a live chat client I’m working on (in which I prevented MySQL database injections via the mysqli_real_escape_string function). The problem of course is that the text the user enters nicely protects you from a MySQL database injection, BUT the text then comes back full of backslash (\) characters (not too cool looking huh). So, to remove these, you can use the following code (here, I use the PHP str_replace function:

// Convert escaped characters back to regular text
$string = str_replace("\\", "", $string);

Thanks to Geoff Muldoon for this one!:
How to replace a backslash character in a string?

// redirect to the same page without the POST data
header(“Location: original-page-with-form.php”);
die;

Here are some of the pages I consulted in my research:

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/get-redirect-after-post
http://www.issociate.de/board/post/171234/Clear_POST_variables_on_page_refresh.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/php-list@yahoogroups.com/msg04635.html
http://qaix.com/php-web-programming/437-896-clear-post-variables-read.shtml

*NOTE: Of course, keep in mind that any header(“Location: PAGE”); PHP code must be included BEFORE any contents are outputted on the page, otherwise you will get the lovely “Headers already sent” PHP error.

Hope this can help anyone else out there who may be struggling with the same issue