Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

When you create the string \\ gets converted to \, which is 
why the slash gets stripped by stripslashes(). 

I don't think you quite understand the reasoning I am giving. I understand that the \\ gets converted in the string to \. The problem is the following string

this is a test\

ends up becoming

this is a test

after a run through stripslashes. Where is the logic in stripslashes stripping out ANY slash that it finds, instead of only stripping out slashes that are used to backslash another character? According to the documentation, the purpose of stripslashes is the following:

"Un-quote string quoted with addslashes()"

Why would stripslashes remove a trailing \ when there is NO way the addslashes() function would ever produce a string that ends in a single trailing \ ? This appears to be a logic error (or really an over-assumption) on the part of stripslashes().

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

Here is a proof why it works: 
 
?php 
        $a = "test\\"; 
        $b = addslashes($a); 
        $c = stripslashes($b); 
 
        var_dump($a === $c); 
?> 

read above.