WP Help. Backslash at the end of searchword breaks custom search form

WP Help. Backslash at the end of searchword breaks custom search form

Accidentally, I discovered that whenever there is a backslash at the end
of a search, the page after clicking submit will return a broken search
form. In my case, the submit button turned into a text area.
Using google chrome's inspect element I saw that my search form turned
into this:
<form method="get" action="">
<input type="hidden" name="type" value="books">
<input type="text" name="search" value="\"> <input type="&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div id=" sidebar"=""
class="sidebar widget-area"></form>
The following code is my form. I am guessing that I need to
sanitize/escape the value from the input type text? But why isn't
esc_attr() working? I am very new at this. Please help. I will extremely
appreciate it!
<form action="" method="get">
<input type="text" name="search" value="<?php echo
esc_attr(stripslashes($_GET['search'])); ?>">
<input type="submit" value="Search">
<input type="checkbox" name="title">
</form>
P.S. I am using this custom search form to search custom fields and
display the resulting custom post types using Pods Plugin. It doesn't
appear that this is a Pods plugin issue though.
https://github.com/pods-framework/pods/issues/1620 Also, this doesn't
appear to be a conflict from another theme or plugin.