Have you considered HTML::Entities? Something similar to the following will work if I understand what you want: 

use HTML::Entities;
my $html = "bad stuff here";
$html = encode_entities($html, "\x80-\xff");

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In reply to Re: A Perl/CGI alternative to PHP's htmlentities()? by madbombX
in thread A Perl/CGI alternative to PHP's htmlentities()? by Spidy

Title:
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