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Surely I'm not the only one that's had to overcome something like this.

I did spend quite some time trying to find a solution reading all the perldoc's.

There wouldn't be a solution -- maybe if its been corrupted once, but more than once and you've got junk with no way back

Fixing broken character encoding
gibberish detection
Encode::Detective - detect a data encoding
Encoding::FixLatin - takes mixed encoding input and produces UTF-8 output
Encode::DoubleEncodedUTF8 - Fix double encoded UTF-8 bytes to the correct one
Encode::Repair - Repair wrongly encoded text strings

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