Changing é into html entities without touching the html elements ?

[Peuplarchie]

Good day to you all,
I'm working on a script which take the text from a txt file and add his content to an php page.
I have no problem with that part, see code below :

$textsec = file_get_contents('text.txt');
echo nl2br($textsec);

This page can include <b> <u>... html element.

Where my problem start is that it's possible that I get some :

é
à

..words with accent..

How can I convert them to their respective html entitie code without touching my html element ?

Thanks!

[dagon]

how about not converting them and using utf8 or what ever charset the txt file is using

[Kudose]

What about [man]html_entity_decode[/man] with the proper character set?