I need a function that will clean a strings' special characters. I do **NOT** want this to convert HTML characters like 
`<br />`
to 
`&lt;br /&gt;`

I want to convert things like: •, ½, ’ to html code.

This is the function I currently use, but it doesn't appear to work with the fractions..

```
function cleanText($str){

$str = str_replace("Ñ" ,"&#209;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ñ" ,"&#241;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ñ" ,"&#241;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Á","&#193;", $str);
$str = str_replace("á","&#225;", $str);
$str = str_replace("É","&#201;", $str);
$str = str_replace("é","&#233;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ú","&#250;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ù","&#249;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Í","&#205;", $str);
$str = str_replace("í","&#237;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Ó","&#211;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ó","&#243;", $str);
$str = str_replace("“","&#8220;", $str);
$str = str_replace("”","&#8221;", $str);

$str = str_replace("‘","&#8216;", $str);
$str = str_replace("’","&#8217;", $str);
$str = str_replace("—","&#8212;", $str);

$str = str_replace("–","&#8211;", $str);
$str = str_replace("™","&trade;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ü","&#252;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Ü","&#220;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Ê","&#202;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ê","&#238;", $str);
$str = str_replace("Ç","&#199;", $str);
$str = str_replace("ç","&#231;", $str);
$str = str_replace("È","&#200;", $str);
$str = str_replace("è","&#232;", $str);
$str = str_replace("•","&#149;" , $str);

$str = str_replace("¼","&#188;" , $str);
$str = str_replace("½","&#189;" , $str);
$str = str_replace("¾","&#190;" , $str);
$str = str_replace("½","&#189;" , $str);

return $str;

}

```