Using stripslashes question

I have some data in a database that looks like this “some text”.
Now what I do is check to see if magic quotes is turned on, if it is than I know that that piece of text will be escaped before putting into the data base.

When I pull the data back out and use the stripslashes(), all I see is a “” but not the data. stripslashes works well with single quoted strings but for some reason I’m having an issue with double quoted strings.

Any ideas?

Thanks