Ensuring valid UTF-8 in PHP

I'm using PHP to handle text from a variety of sources. I don't anticipate it will be anything other than UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, or perhaps Windows-1252. If it's anything other than one of those, I just need to make sure the text gets turned into a valid UTF-8 string, even if characters are lost. Does the //TRANSLIT option of iconv solve this?

For example, would this code ensure that a string is safe to insert into a UTF-8 encoded document (or database)?

function make_safe_for_utf8_use($string) {

    $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string, "UTF-8,ISO-8859-1,WINDOWS-1252");

    if ($encoding != 'UTF-8') {
        return iconv($encoding, 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $string);
    }
    else {
        return $string;
    }
}