If you work with multi-language content when coding pages or web based applications you probably are familiarized with the considerations on special character use.
Choosing between use of HTML entities or raw UTF-8 characters will depend of the final user requirements and the limitations of the developer to edit with the code.
scc2html is a command-line bash script that will change common used special characters to HTML entities. It has been tested on a Mac with Snow Leopard (Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0) and Debian Linux Lenny 5.5. Basically the only requirement is to have Perl installed.