Reg Ex Alter and Replace

Hello All.

I need to change:

<previous art_id="[something]">[something2]</previous>
to
<a href="[something2]">[something2]</a>

However, the first for the first [something2] I need to replace special characters like whitespaces before i rewrite it.  So this wouldn't work:

$content=~s /<previous art_id=\"[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\">(.*)<\/previous>/<a href=\"$1\">$1<\/a>/gi;

Because the first $1 still has characters that I want to replace for links.

For an actual example:

<previous art_id="insurance">Homeowner's Insurance</previous>
needs to be
<a href="Homeowner&#39;s+Insurance">Homeowner's Insurance</a>

Thanks for the help in advance!  Hope I made everything clear enough.