Real escape string and PDO

PDO offers an alternative designed to replace mysql_escape_string() with the PDO::quote() method.

Here is an excerpt from the PHP website:

<?php
    $conn = new PDO('sqlite:/home/lynn/music.sql3');

    /* Simple string */
    $string = 'Nice';
    print "Unquoted string: $string\n";
    print "Quoted string: " . $conn->quote($string) . "\n";
?>

The above code will output:

Unquoted string: Nice
Quoted string: 'Nice'

You should use PDO Prepare

From the link:

Calling PDO::prepare() and PDOStatement::execute() for statements that will be issued multiple times with different parameter values optimizes the performance of your application by allowing the driver to negotiate client and/or server side caching of the query plan and meta information, and helps to prevent SQL injection attacks by eliminating the need to manually quote the parameters.