No, you don&#x27;t need to unescape it when displaying it.<p>This SQL literal string:<p><pre><code>    &#x27;Gijs in \&#x27;t Veld&#x27; 
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Is a representation for these ASCII bytes&#x2F;content:<p><pre><code>    Gijs in &#x27;t Veld

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In other words. The backslash will not be stored as part of the string into the database. It&#x27;s just a hint to the SQL parser that the following single quote should be interpreted as a literal single quote char and not as the end-of-string-character.<p>From a security perspective there is nothing more &quot;proper&quot; about prepared queries than correctly escaped non-prepared queries.