how to escape single quotes

Hi,

How do I guard against single quotes in text messing up my SQL statements. For example, I have some text like:

'this is some text. It's got an apostrophe in it'

ie there's inadvertantly 3 single quotes there, which ruin the SQL statement. I could URL-encode the text first and URL-decode it afterwards (using PHP), but is there a 'proper' way to encode it (in Oracle 8)?

tia,

• Kev