You can do this with a simple module, The following is adapted from PerlIO::via::QuotedPrint and can be installed into the same directory as that module.

package PerlIO::via::HtmlEncode;
 
 
$VERSION = '0.01';
use strict;
 
 
use HTML::Entities;
 
 
1;
 
sub PUSHED { bless \*PUSHED,$_[0] }
 
 
sub FILL {
 
    my $line = readline( $_[1] );
    (defined $line) ? decode_entities( $line ) : undef;
}
 
sub WRITE {
 
    (print {$_[2]} encode_entities($_[1])) ? length($_[1]) : -1;
}
 
1;
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use PerlIO::via::HtmlEncode;
                                                                      
+          
binmode STDOUT,':via(HtmlEncode)';
                                                                      
+          
print "&£<>";
[download]

If I get a minute I could package that and upload it to CPAN.

/J\

You probably can get away with tieing the filehandle with Tie::Handle. Here's an example:

package html;
require Tie::Handle;
@ISA = qw/Tie::Handle/;

use HTML::Entities;

sub TIEHANDLE {
    return bless({}, shift);
}

sub PRINT {
    untie *STDOUT;
    print encode_entities(join "", @_);
    tie *STDOUT, "html";
}

package main;

tie *STDOUT, "html";
print "foo & bar\n";
[download]

It might need some work to plug cleanly in whatever code you need to write.