Using mysqli_real_escape_string on a mysql results associative array

I am trying to copy the contents of a table from one server to a duplicate table on another server. This will be in a cronjob. There are only about 200 records that need daily updating. I don't want to use PHPMYAdmin, Navicat, etc. as I want it to be run via the server. I am truncating the destination table prior to the copy.

I was following the example here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23657043/2413654 ($L1 is the connection to server 1, $L2 for server 2)

But some of the data in source table contains apostrophes, etc. and the insert fails.

I tried adding mysqli_real_escape_string to the value of $v in the iteration below, but it still errors on the first apostrophe encountered in the data.

Any suggestions? Is there a better way of doing this task?

Here is my code:

$re = mysqli_query($L1, "SELECT * FROM ft_form_2");
$keyfield = 'submission_id';

while($i=mysqli_fetch_assoc($re))

{
    $u = array();
        foreach($i as $k=>$v) 

            $v = mysqli_real_escape_string($L2,$v); // added, but not working

    if($k!=$keyfield) $u[] = "$k='$v'";
    mysqli_query($L2,"INSERT INTO ft_form_2_test (".implode(',',array_keys($i)).") 
    VALUES ('".implode("','",$i)."') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ".implode(',', $u)) 
        or die(mysqli_error());
}