function to escape single quotes

Hi,

 

I would like to write a PL/PGSQL function that would escape any occurence of single quotes in a string, and call this function before inserting the unescaped strings into some tables. Is this a good approach to make sure all strings are escaped before inserting into tables? I thought this would be a good idea as there would be a single point of control on escaping the strings.

 

For example, in our customer_data table we have the fields firstname,lastname, street etc. Some people's name have single quotes in them, and some people have addresses with single quotes in them. So I need to write a function that would take any string, see if it has a quote in it and escape it. Then, is it possible to write a trigger before inserting to call this function and then perform the insert??

 

Please give me some pointers on writing this function and creating the trigger.

 

Thanks,

Saranya