Escape cp-1252 chars in HTML

This is for when people paste crap from MS Word into html and add all those funky characters that looks horrible.

My friend gave me this perl one liner (ok, you can use it as a one liner if you wanted to) to escape the the evil CP-1252 characters in your HTML.
<br />sub htmlEscape1252 {<br /> my $str = shift;<br /><br /> # remove control characters and nbsp<br /> $str =~ s{([\x00-\x08\x11\x12\x14-\x19\x7f\xA0])}{ }g;<br /><br /> # escape the rest with &#123; syntax<br /> $str =~ s{([\x80-\x9f\xA1-\xff])}{'&#'.ord($1).';'}ge;<br /><br /> return $str;<br />}<br />
Notes for porting:
ord($1) converts capture group 1 to ASCII.
assumes $str has your html

Bonus!
the above regex replaces control chars!