Works for me. I suppose you could always output all the characters from 0 to 255 (or is it 1 to 256?) with their hex codes and then use those instead, but why bother if the other method works? You just have to be careful of characters that mean something in regex.

Given, when I did this, it was for personal use.

EDIT: A module for this would be helpful, if anyone can suggest one. Something that translates useful but non-standard characters to entities, and removes a user-defined set of characters entirely.