The input data is pure German (well, Austrian) text, so it's only Umlauts and "scharfes s" that are causing problems. Oh, and maybe a french accent or two. Output should be ISO-8859-1
Currently, as a first workaround, I did a quick hashlookup-regex-thingy, a bit like you suggested. But I guess I'll move to one of the CPAN modules suggested by others, as soon as I can get to sysadmin to install them (/me hates not having shell/su access to machines...)
As writing to and reading from the DB is done by the same app, your last suggestion doesn't solve my problem.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}