To me this is the wrong time/place to worry about this. You deal with issues like that when you read your data in

That's what I was originally doing, too. But because I still needed to use the data and manipulated it and return it to the user, it meant I needed to keep two copies of the data. One that was from the form/input and one that was the quoted version (which would be just as updated).

What I was aiming for was flexibility more than anything else. But I guess that the abstraction layer I've written for the DB stuff now should accomplish the flexibility since it handles matching the names, values and placeholders automatically and always runs prepare() on them itself.