Attempt at converting entities in plain text email

Hi there,

Seems html entities are not handled, so I'm investigating a way to convert these entities to their plain text (or utf8) equivalents before sending out an email. I was playing around with a function like this:

function handle_entities($text) {
  $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);  
  $trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl);
  return strtr($text, $trans_tbl);
}

But was wondering if maybe there was a better approach.