escape char hell ....

hi, i've got myself into a bit of a mess. i have a database with approx 4000 records (mysql) and when i populated the database i was given 4000 text files with the product name as the file name and the description of the product as the contents. so i set up a text field in the table to hold the descriptions and wrote a script in php to handle the import. all went well, client impressed etc, but now i'm running into problems with allsorts of escape chars in the description field and am looking for a script that will strip the escape chars from the database ... anyone had similar problems ? new records added to the db now have all html chars translated on input and translated on query. many thanks, Steve