php - simplexml_load_string is turning " " into "Â"

I'm using href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-string.php"
rel="nofollow">simplexml_load_string to load an
XML document into an object. This seemed to be working great up until I came across this
element:

1.    
            Some
            text.

After
running that ran through simplexml_load_string, what came out
was:

["some_string_val"]=>
            string(20) "1.    Some
            text"

I tried
using:

html_entity_decode($string,
            ENT_QUOTES,
            "Windows-1252");

And
that seemed to convert the  's to plain text, but when
I tried to run that through simplexml_load_string I get the
same result. I also tried with UTF-8, and a few others, with similar or worse
results.

So, what can I do to convert the
 's to UTF-8 so it can be parsed correctly by
simplexml_load_string? Keeping the HTML entities intact is not
a concern because this is going into a
CSV.

EDIT: This has been unjustly marked as a
duplicate for a couple of
reasons:

1. This is not
   language agnostic; this is dealing with a specific set of PHP functions, unlike the post
   which this was marked a duplicate of


2. This is not going to
   an HTML page or a PDF, it is going to a CSV, so I cannot set a header. The accepted
   solution will not work in my case

Answer

I think it parses correctly. It just the way
that function works, replacing those codes with special
characters.

You can fix the result string,
converting it into cp1251

$str =
            iconv('utf-8', 'cp1251',
            $str);

Also I would
delete double spaces before writing it into CSV
file

$str =
            str_replace(chr(160), ' ', $str);
$str= trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ',
            $str));