note Kenosis <p>Perhaps [http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Text-Unidecode-0.04/lib/Text/Unidecode.pm|Text::Unidecode] would be helpful (please forgive the lack of complete <c>code formatting</c>, as doing so eliminates displaying the characters the module decodes):</p> <c> use strict; use warnings; use utf8; use Text::Unidecode; </c><p>my $string = q/‘ and ’ “ and ” and ä/;</p><c> print unidecode($string); </c> <p>Output:</p> <p> ' and ' " and " and a </p> 1015956 1015956