function to addslashes to each input from a form help

Ok I've been away with php for a while now but a job requires me to code a backend structure for a site I'm doing.

I have a form that gets the users details, checks them over to make sure everything is on the up and up and then submits it to a database.
I wrote a function to check each input from the form and clean it up a bit by doing htmlspecialchars and addslashes but it doesn't seem to be working.

Function

function cleanupinput($form_vars)
{
foreach ($form_vars as $key => $value)
{
addslashes($value);
}
}

Than in my file I call it by doing a simple call to the function right before it gets inserted.


cleanupinput($_POST);


The data is being inserted fine but no slashes are being added so I'm clearly doing something wrong. It's late and I've been slaving away for a while so it's probably something simple I'm missing here.
Any help would be great.

function &cleanupinput($form_vars)
{
foreach ..........
{
// strip_tags / trim / addslashes
}
return $form_vars;
}


$clean_post = &cleanupinput($_POST);

Thanks. :)

Now how would I than add each input from the form to a database after that check?

$clean_post returns as an array does it not?
I had it set up before to just query the database by inserting each input name.

Any takers? :)

this would keep $_POST intact if you already have code utilising it?


<?
$_POST['test']="hel'lo'a";
$_POST['test2']="h'el'lo'a";

function slasher(&$k){
$k=addslashes($k);
}

$rets=array_walk($_POST,slasher);

//test output//
print_r($_POST);
?>

Well I'll explain a bit more what I'm trying to do.

I'll try to sum it up quickly

Have form that gets input from user

I wrote that function above to addslashes along with other stuff to each input so I don't have to manually do it to each one

After the slashes have been added I wish to insert all the inputs into a database.

They will be going into one table thats in the database and there are the same amount of records for each input i.e each input will go into a seperate row within the table.