PHP: Parse text for RSS-feed?

Question

Hello

First, I'm not looking a way to parse an RSS-feed. I am creating an rss-feed myself, but now I've got a problem.

I'm putting some text to description (obvisiously), but it gives me errors of some unallowed chars (for example "&"). Is there a way to remove all these chars or should I parse every char manually?

Also, in my feed finnish chars (ä,å,ö) are showing some weird stuff instead of the char. Which charset should I use?

Martti Laine