URL encoding

Sure, right after I get done arguing about URL encoding last week I find
myself writing a socket program that needs to do it.  Boy, if that don't
beat all;-)

I am sending a stream of XML through a socket connection and am wondering if
I need to encode all of the '<', '>', '/', etc with %3C, %3E, and %2F
respectively?  And any other characters for that matter. . .

I am assuming I do need to do this so I am wondering if somebody knows of a
tool that somebody has already created to do the URL encoding so I can save
myself some time.

Thanks,
Aaron Bartell