Checks to see if a string is actually the serialized version of an array. If it is, we return an unserialized version. If not, return the original string. This way, we can just call our function on stored DB values and not worry about checking the results.

This was snagged from the Wordpress 2.0 source. Yayyy for Open Source!

	function maybe_unserialize ( $original ) {
		if ( false !== $gm = @ unserialize($original) )
			return $gm;
		else
			return $original;
	}

This function first checks to see if PHP is set to automagically quote stuff. If it is, we first strip pre-quoted stuff, then (assuming our text isn't numeric), we properly quote everything.

A good bit of room for improvement here, but at the very least, you should hit this before inserting anything into your database.

	// check to see if a string needs to be escaped for database input
	function escapeit ( $text ) {
		
		if ( get_magic_quotes_gpc() ) {
			$text = stripslashes($text);
		}
		
		if ( !is_numeric($text) ) {
			
			$text = mysql_real_escape_string($text);
			
		}
		
		return $text;
		
	}