Convert Characters

Hi, Is there a way to convert any character to it's HTML &#xxx; equivalent in PHP? For example A is the letter "A" where the number 65 represents it's ASCII code. I need to do this because I need to store Unicode Characters in a MySQL database.. This is because Unicode chars example ŭ use 2 bytes and when I try to store it, it appears as 2 separate nonsense characters in the db. Is there any different solution to my prob? Maybe I dont need to convert the chars.. Is there a way to instruct a MySQL database to accept unice characters? Thanks, Reuben