[support] Strange characters in source of block

[Earnie Boyd]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 12:17 PM, Anthony <tony at tony-mac.com> wrote:
> Bluehost mail to me
> "Hi,
> It is a drupal problem in the fact that drupal was written to work on a
> centos environment and that a change from centos 5 to centos 6 results in
> the problems you experienced.
> Its a known bug with drupal and yes, we did make the upgrade, but it is
> still a drupal issue with the centos 6 environment.
>
> You have two options to stop the escape characters from being inserted:
>
> 1. Change to PHP 5.3 and update your Drupal installation to the most recent
> version.  This can be done in the PHP Config section of the cPanel.
> Simply click on the radio button to the left of PHP 5.3 or PHP 5.3 Single
> (depending on which php.ini behavior you prefer) and then save the changes.
>
> 2. You may also disable magic_quotes_gpc in the php.ini.
> This is done by finding the php.ini that applies to your Drupal installation
> in the File Manager, and Editing it.
> Once inside, search (the ctrl+f find function is recommended) for the line
> magic_quotes_gpc=On and set this variable to magic_quotes_gpc=Off
>
> Here is a thread on the drupal forums themselves that goes more into detail
> about the problem and some fixes: http://drupal.org/node/1437998
> "

Just as I thought, the forum entry you note proves to me that BlueHost
is blowing smoke.  The issue is really that PHP has the bug.  There
are two workarounds.  The best being updating php.ini file.  The
second being removing the php_flag magic_quotes_gpc setting in
.htaccess.  Also note that PHP 5.4 no longer has this setting.

-- 
Earnie
-- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd