addslashes

Addslashes takes a string as an argument, and returns a string with backslashes before characters that need to be quoted in database queries etc. These characters are single quote [ ' ], double quote [ " ], backslash [ \ ] and NULL (the NULL byte).

PHP

echo addslashes("Here's some money for your lunch");
// => Here\'s some money for your lunch

Ruby

puts "Here's some money for your lunch".gsub(/['"\\\x0]/,'\\\\\0');
# => Here\'s some money for your lunch

As you can see above, the easiest way to emulate the PHP function addslashes() in Ruby is to use regular expressions.