Question: 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?

Answer: 
You can use the [htmlentities() function](http://us3.php.net/htmlentities). This will replace all special characters with their HTML equivalent. It should do the job.
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');
}

```