preg_replace removing backslashes

[thegauntlet]

New to PHP.  Having problems with preg_replace.  A lot of press releases I post have characters that UTF-8 doesn't like so I am trying to just use preg_replace to replace them with the valid characters.  The issue is all the / backslashes get removed in the html, urls, tags, etc.  I don't want them removed. My code is below.

$article = "$row->article";
    	$patterns[0] = '/“/';
        $patterns[1] = '/’/';
	$replacements[0] = '"';
       $replacements[1] = '\'';
	$newarticle = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $article);

[monkeytooth]

Check out this post may help a little bit also, look into "stripslashes" don't know if it removes forward slashes though

http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php?topic=228986.0