Converting fractions to html entities

We've got some fraction information stored in the database, e.g. ¾ ½

Short of doing a search and replace, are there any inbuilt PHP functions that will automatically convert these to proper html entities?

From stackoverflow

• You can use the htmlentities() function. This will replace all special characters with their HTML equivalent. It should do the job your require.

  Good question btw, +1.

• try htmlentities()

• htmlentities.

  But you probably don't need to. Serve your page in an encoding that includes them (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1) and you can include those as literal, unescaped characters.

  Tom : really? does this just apply to fractions?

  David Caunt : Utf-8 will allow you to use almost any character without conversion. You should still call htmlentities for security, though. http://akrabat.com/2009/03/18/utf8-php-and-mysql/ details the steps to use UTF-8 - you need to make changes to php, mysql and html.

  bobince : It applies to anything you can fit in the encoding you're using. If you're in ISO-8859-1 (Western European) you get up to U+00FF, which includes ¼½¾ (U+00BC-U+00BE). If you're using UTF-8, that includes the whole Unicode character gamut. Though you'd still need htmlspecialchars to deal with ‘<’/‘&’.

• The answer is already given: use htmlentities(). In addition, the use of UTF-8 has been suggested, which of course is a really good idea. However, if you're planning on using htmlentities() on UTF-8 strings, use the following code (or you'll get weirdly encoded characters):

  htmlentities($str, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')
  

  As you can imagine, it sucks having to add the second and third argument all the time. For most projects I need htmlentities() in, I end up writing the a shortcut function, i.e.:

  function he($str) { // shortcut function for htmlentities() with UTF-8 settings
   return htmlentities($str, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
  }