Converting HTML Entities to thier numeric equivalent

[Wonko the sane]

I am looking for an easy way to convert HTML entities, like

´
 
&

into thier numeric representations.

So.
& would be converted to &
¡ would be converted to ¡

and so on.

I need this to work for ALL of the HTML entities. I am trying to get out of writting
a search and replace regex for all 255 of the different HTML entities like this. :)

I find it hard to believe that there is not a module already out ther that can do this for me.

Any help or pointer on solving this problem would be much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Wonko