How can I convert special chars into html entities

Question

One of my matrix cells for the caption/description is set to NONE formatting. Sometimes, editors will put in quote marks which confuses my html code. How do I convert any special chars like the qoute mark to html entities? A bit like PHP's htmlspecialchars or htmlentities.

Thanks

Answer 1

I always do this with a simple plugin which runs unformatted text through EE/CodeIgniter's format_characters() method (though rather than use the plugin tag in my template, I usually select it as the formatting method for that field or Matrix column).

I've thrown it up on GitHub just now.