entities in transformations to html

Hello,
This is a generic question about what can be the best way to solve a
simple problem. I have a database where i store different texts, that i
export in xml an then transform in different formats using xslt.

1) Most of this texts are in Italian, so i have to use entities in html
transformations (some user may not be able to support iso-8859-1)

2) i should need to transform texts in plain .txt or wap or something
oother, so may be a bad idea to use html entities directly in the xml
input processed via xslt

3) there are many html entities that i use rarely (arrows, Greek
characters,ecc), but can be usefull in some cases...

more specificly the question is:
 -> is there in xslt any macro instruction similar to the php
htmlenties(): a function that transform any special character of a
string in the corresponding html entity?

Thank you in advance,
bye,
_Andrea