Escaping strings into GConf keys

(Hopefully I picked an appropriate list for this)

Is there a handy function somewhere to take arbitrary strings and convert 
them into valid GConf keys?

In particular, I wish to have keys named after XML Formal Public Identifiers, 
which can contain slashes, spaces and other punctuation - hence I'd need an 
encode/decode stage to mangle/escape the invalid characters.

If such a feature doesn't exist yet, would you like one? (probably 
implemented as a pair of functions, so that you can losslessly convert in 
both directions)

Thanks in advance

Dave Malcolm
www.conglomerate.org