I'll have to take a close look at those commands. That sounds like something I do want to do. I've been fine on my own site with writing HTML entities for my posts, even to the extent of using ' every time I wanted to use a single quote (darn contractions). Now I'm going to be using the code on other sites now, and I want to make it a little more idiot-proof (or as much as can be expected).

Thanks.

ps- in str_replace(), how do you indicate a carriage return as the subject? I'd like to replace carriage returns with line breaks, and I can figure out all the variables but that one. Actually, I'm not sure how to indicate any of those examples you mentioned in your post about the function.