sed gets to be a pain and a real mess and is hard to read and understand when you have to escape things like / etc. Idid not realize until recently that you don't need to use / as a separator, you can use virtually any non letter or number character. Eg we have used # as the separator to avoid having to escape the forward slashes and in this way the command is plain, easy to understand, edit and saves time/hassle without the need for escaping. sed -i s#http........

The first thing to diagnose is what is actually in the database (use PHPMyAdmin or CLI). You will of course either find that the backslash is either in the database or not. If the backslash is in the database you probably have magic quotes gpc/runtime on and/or are calling the "addslashes()" function which does this. If you are escaping your data with mysql_real_escape_string() then think again, you probably have magic quotes gpc enabled either in php.ini or........

I was getting frustrated with trying to write a simple URL like this: /example-withdash I used the htaccess code like this: Rewriterule ^example-withdash$ / [R=301] I also tried escaping the dash which I thought should have treated it as a literal but that didn't work either: Rewriterule ^example-withdash$ / [R=301] But it wouldn't work, apparently the "-" dash means don't substitute,........