parsing text for special characters

I've got an html form, and I have PHP parse the message variables for special characters so when I concatenate all off the message variables together, if a person has put in a ' " or other special character, it won't break it when it used in mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message", "$headers"); below is my snippet of code, but is there a better way to parse the text for special characters. what about if I were to have the $message inserted into a mysql field? how would I need to handle special characters that way?

$need_message = $_POST['need_message'];

function flash_encode($need_message)
{
$string = rawurlencode(utf8_encode($need_message));

$string = str_replace("%C2%96", "-", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%91", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%92", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%82", "%27", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%93", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%94", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%84", "%22", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%8B", "%C2%AB", $need_message);
$string = str_replace("%C2%9B", "%C2%BB", $need_message);

return $need_message;
}

//and then there are $topic_message, $fee_message, etc and they all get concatenated with
$message .= needs_message;
$message .= $topics_message;
$message .= $fee message;

//emails the $message
mail($to, "MMH Suggestion", "$message", "$headers");
.

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