Auto-replace special characters with HTML encodings

I would like to suggest adding a button or menu option to quickly search text 
for special characters and automatically HTML encode them.  

Imported text often contains curly quotes (ldquo, rdquo, lsquo, rsquo), 
emdashes, accented vowels, etc.  Currently, one must run find and replace for 
each special character on each xhtml file individually.  It seems to me that 
HTML encoding special characters is such a common task that automating it would 
speed up book creation considerably.  (It would also help to avoid missing an 
uncommon special character from imported text.)  

An ideal implementation would also encode special characters which do not have 
named escape codes by using their hexidecimal unicode block number, such as 
&#x1F603;

Original issue reported on code.google.com by blende...@blendenzo.com on 27 Jul 2013 at 7:42

oasegips / sigil

Auto-replace special characters with HTML encodings #2336