自动php回显HTMl特殊字符

I'm developing a php web app in Portuguese, but when I want to echo some word with special character, like:

ç õ â é

The echo prints the html equivalent. Is there any function that convertsthe special characters to their html equivalent?

Tks

I think you want to use htmlentities()

http://ch.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

what is your page encoding? utf-8? and what is your file's encoding? try to set the file's encoding to UTF-8 without BOM and set page encoding to utf-8