categorized answer QandAEditors I should warn you that while this code may work for ascii, it most definitely will not work for other character sets and/or encodings. <p> You can use the Unicode::Map module like this: <pre> perl -MUnicode::Map -e'print Unicode::Map->new(shift)->to8(<>)' </pre> There is also to16() if you need utf16. <p> Note that not all mappings are round-trip, i.e. you won't necessarily get back what you put in if you try to "undo" the conversion. <p> For lots and lots of information on dealing with complex character set and encoding issues, see Ken Lunde's excellent book CJKV Information Processing from O'Reilly. <p> Or to skip the reading, you can just go to <a href="ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/examples/nutshell/cjkv/"> the examples</a> and look at the perl directory. <p> 36788