Question

Is there a PHP function / procedure that would take punctuation in a form such as commas, explanation marks, pound signs, quotation marks etc.. and reformat them with their correct html definitions.

eg. £ to become £

Answer 1

You are looking for htmlspecialchars which replaces only five characters (&, ", ', <, >):

echo htmlspecialchars($str);

OR htmlentities which replaces all input:

echo htmlentities($str);