Would it work if you used a regex to turn any but a list of "safe" characters into escaped hexadecimals - the following, which I have cribbed from the otherwise annoying CGI Programming with Perl, may be what you want: 
$dirty_string =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_.!~() -])/sprintf "%%%02X", ord($1)/ei
+;

[download]
You could then translate them back at your leisure.

§ George Sherston

In reply to Re: Form Entry to HTML and Plain text by George_Sherston
in thread Form Entry to HTML and Plain text by belize

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