double slash '//' with drupal_goto I am using drupal_goto and url methods to try and direct the user to a page.

url returns a string like "/whatever/example" and then I pass that into drupal_goto and they get sent to

localhost//whatever/example

I checked the value for $base_url in settings.php that has no trailing slash. what else could cause this behavior?
Whatever you pass to drupal_goto() will in turn get passed on to the url() function. If you're using url() on the path before hand, it'll get run through again and you'll get a double slash.

You can just pass the router path to drupal_goto() directly, and it will handle the alias for you:

drupal_goto('node/1234');