single quotes in mysql update query????

[admin]

hi,

i am writing a program to send data to a php file to update a db in mysql. it seems that all my data works (even double quotes) but the single quotes do not work because my query looks like this:

=> update... set something = '$text'

now, because $text is surrounded by single quotes, i think the single quote in the data passed to $text conflicts with the ending single quote in the query. so i tried to

=> ereg_replace("'", "\'", $text)

but this make every single quote as \\' (i.e., it inserts two back slashes instead of one!))

i checked the php.net help and there are two functions (htmlspecialchars as well as htmlentities) but none of them is working!

please please help! what can i do now? what do you people do for inserting the data so that ____lesser than sign, greater than sign, double quote, single quote, ampersand____ can be inserted as well retrieved correctly? i think for the display side, htmlspecialchars() might work, but not for inserting or updating.

pls pls help! i am using PEAR db abstraction layer.

thanks!!