minor nits, OT of your now-solved chief question:
First..

...because the nasty characters my customers insist on typing into their descriptions occasionally makes the HTML page break.
For example, I want to exchange a tick mark (') with (& rsquo ;) ...

You're on the money in saying "customers" sometimes insert "nasty characters." They certainly can and do and sometimes that will bork stuff... but I don't know any way a simple tick could, in your word "break" the HTML page; an ASCII "'" does NOT (in my experience) cause any issue with a browser's rendering. Perhaps this is merely incautious phrasing, but if not, I'd be interested in an example to clarify my understanding.

and, second... When posting two distinct bits of code, it would be well to enclose them in individual sets of <c>...</c> tags,

Welcome to the Monastery! Perhaps the promptitude of the excellent replies above will prompt you to get a login.

In reply to Re: Trouble Getting Local Variable $_ to return reformatted string by ww
in thread Trouble Getting Local Variable $_ to return reformatted string by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.