I am attempting to make my site comply to w3c standards (xhtml 1.0 strict) and slowly but painfuly getting there. However I have hit a brickwall as regards to my blog.

I need a function to convert all symbols to their entiy equivelent and apply this function to all the records in the db (FIELDS: maincontent,title, shortblurb TABLE: bl_blog) as well as changing <br> to <br /> as that is an old bad habit i used in the blog posts frequently!

I never knew about the 'correct' way to use html and have got into many bad habits (mainly aqquired because I used FrontPage to learn basic html when I was 7/8) until I bought a new book (Webdesign in a Nutshell - A Desktop Quick Reference by Jennifer Neiderst Robbins - IMEI:0-596-00987-9) on saturday

Re-learning 8 years of bad habbits is a huge task, but hopefuly I'l get the hang of it soon!

Any good quality tutorials & books on any of the following would be greatly apreciated!:
Using divs instead of tables
XHTML 1.0 Strict
BASIC & Free SEO
Advanced CSS 2.1

I will 'do a google' but google doesnt learn from previous experiances and also often wont pick up the small sites that can often be the best!

for that you can use this function

PHP Code:

$trans = array(
             "<br>" => "<br />",
             " & " => "&amp;"
             );
echo strtr("hi all, <br> I said hello", $trans); 


I believe there is an TIDY extension for PHP, which can correct many of those small blurbs automatically, but I never did looked in it.

It could help you. It won't update your db contents, but the output should be better
http://www.php.net/tidy