How to replace special characters with html code characters automatically?

A colleague and I work on these html pages. They eventually end up as emails, but we have the cold fusion server to pre process them. One thing we are trying to do is eliminate problems caused by unencoded copyright, trademark and smart quote symbols.

How could I create an array of find / replace commands in the header so it processes the HTML with correct character codes.

I"m not cold fusion aware, so any kind of starter info would be great. Eventually I might add more replacements to the array.

As an example TM (font character) would process to ™ and a smart quote or apostrophe would process to a straight one. an en dash character would become –

Because we copy paste from places, this often happens and it seems like cold fusion could solve the problem quickly and repeatedly all at once.

thanks for any help

-smick