Converting symbols with PHP

[jc_gmk]

I have a MySQL database that has lots of text in.
some of the characters used are things like &, ®

How can I make sure that when a php script calls the data it converts all the characters in to the correct html e.g.
& = &
® = ®

[boogyman]

htmlentities($tring); 

http://us3.php.net/htmlentities

[jc_gmk]

Had tried that but it didn't work. Just realized why not though.

here is an example of the text in my database:

some text here & some more text here <br>
some text here & some more text here ® <br><br>
some text here & some more text here ®

I want to include the <br>'s as line breaks but change the charachters into html.
I want it to output html like this

some text here &amp; some more text here <br>
some text here &amp; some more text here &reg; <br><br>
some text here &amp; some more text here &reg;

Is this possible?

[jamiller]

yeah, just include that &amp; in your database. If your database is reading the <br/>'s back as html line breaks, what makes you think it won't read &amp; as the & symbol?

[boogyman]

htmlspecialchars($tring);

is the other method to which parse character codes.

yeah, just include that &amp; in your database. If your database is reading the <br/>'s back as html line breaks, what makes you think it won't read &amp; as the & symbol?

some characters are harmful to the database, some characters are harmful to the web browser. its better to just do the distinction when the time comes...
eg (%) is a quantifier in a SQL Database, however (%) is perfectly acceptable in a web browser. translation should always be done where appropriate if possible.

some text here & some more text here <br>
some text here & some more text here ® <br><br>
some text here & some more text here ®

this is very fishy as a possible misuse of the break line tag.
perhaps use <span>text</span> and in your stylesheet put span { display:block }

[tech_support]

It's better to use

<p>some text</p><p>some text</p>

[jc_gmk]

Thanks for all you help!
I have now sorted the problem.

The problem was that I already have hundreds of entries in my database similar to this, and would take hours to edit them all:

some text here & some more text here <br> something else could go here <br>
some text here & some more text here® <br><br>
some text® here & some more text here

my solution was the str_replace() function e.g.

$text_from_database = "this text was generated by a mysql query <br> & contains some symbols®"; 

$replace_this = array("®", "&");
$replace_with = array("&reg;", "&amp;");

print str_replace($replace_this, $replace_with, $text_from_database); 

This then would output this HTML:

this text was generated by a mysql query <br> &amp; contains some symbols&reg;

Which would then display like this in the browser:

this text was generated by a mysql query
& contains some symbols®