Discovered that my most recent conversion from SQLite to MySQL seems to have screwed up my backslashes in all my posts that have backslashes.
This is bad because my code snippets should not be copy & pasted and run at face value unless you verify the code! It could seriously break shit.
Ugh. This is going to be a PITA to go and fix 500 posts. It might be quicker to try to fix the SQLite DB file and try another conversion. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this problem. I see the issue when I restore from XML files as well, and even just copying database using something like mysqldump to dump and then importing using mysql command. I’m probably just missing a simple flag to not strip slashes or something.
My next step is to confirm if there is actually a backslash in the SQL data and it is just being stripped in the_content() or something; or if the backslash is REALLY not there. *sad face*
update 1: the slashes are not in SQL. Looks like I need to look at my export DB to see if they are in that. *crosses fingers*
update 2: found this article that creates a function to convert backslashes into HTML entities as the posts are saved. https://www.tweaking4all.com/web-development/wordpress/preserve-backslash-in-posts/#comment-268277