display VARCHAR(mysql) and special chars in html

[Jonas Meurer]

hello,

my script selects a comment saved as VARCHAR in MySQL and displays it
inside an html page.

the problem is, that the comment contains several special characters, as
mysterious utf-8 hyphens, german umlauts, etc.

i could write a function to parse the comment and substitute special
chars with the relevant html code, but maybe this already exists in some
module?

if not, it'll be hard work, as i've to consider many special chars, and
at least iso-8859-1* and utf-8 as charmaps.

bye
 jonas