I've seen lots of functions to convert all the entities, but I needed to do a fulltext search in a db field that had named entities instead of numeric entities (edited by tinymce), so I searched the tinymce source and found a string with the value->entity mapping. So, i wrote the following function to encode the user's query with named entities.

The string I used is different of the original, because i didn't want to convert ' or ". The string is too long, so I had to cut it. To get the original check TinyMCE source and search for nbsp or other entity ;)