Apostrophes getting converted to html entities

[eluser]Oblong[/eluser]
I realise it's part of sanitising the data via xss_clean, but I need to export the table into an csv file to be opened by Excel, so would prefer the apostrophe handled differently rather than converted to an html entity, e.g. using mysql_real_escape_string();

Trying to find the xss_clean function in the source.