parsing text for special characters

[Adam Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've got an html form, and I have PHP parse the message variables for 
special characters so when I concatenate all off the message variables 
together, if a person has put in a ' " or other special character, it 
won't break it when it used in mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message", 
"$headers");  below is my snippet of code, but is there a better way to 
parse the text for special characters.  what about if I were to have the 
$message inserted into a mysql field?  how would I need to handle 
special characters that way?

$need_message = $_POST['need_message'];

  function flash_encode($need_message)
  {
     $string = rawurlencode(utf8_encode($need_message));

     $string = str_replace("%C2%96", "-", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%91", "%27", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%92", "%27", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%82", "%27", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%93", "%22", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%94", "%22", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%84", "%22", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%8B", "%C2%AB", $need_message);
     $string = str_replace("%C2%9B", "%C2%BB", $need_message);

     return $need_message;
  }

//and then there are $topic_message, $fee_message, etc and they all get 
concatenated with
$message .= needs_message;
$message .= $topics_message;
$message .= $fee message;

//emails the $message
mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message", "$headers");

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