htmlentities

Further to my post about problems with single quotes in a login sequence... I also have a form in which I enter the text of articles. These naturally contain quotes of both types, ampersands and all that good stuff. So, I read the text in from a database and I've tried applying htmlentities() to the fields, but without success. For example, let's say we have a field called 'standfirst' and it contains text including a single quote. I try using: $standfirst = htmlentities($standfirst,ENT_QUOTES); But when this field is passed to the next page (using POST), the single quotes are escaped still. I'm getting in a real mess with all this escaping business. I've tried the PHP .cfm manual, but it's not helping. Can anyone point me to a *clear* description of how to deal with this stuff? Please? +a Steve