parsing text for special characters

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");