finding if string is already escaped or not?
<p>I am getting following data</p>

<pre><code>&lt;font color=\"#ff0000\" face=\"Verdana\" size=\"5\"&gt;hello there&lt;/font&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>I have 2 questions</p>

<ul>
<li><p>How can I find whether quotes and other things are already escaped (i.e., already preceeded by \ or not)?</p></li>
<li><p>I will be storing this string to one of the fields in database table. Should I convert all HTML special characters to entities like <code>&lt;</code> should be converted to  <code>&amp;lt</code></p></li>
</ul>
