http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1022163


in reply to string conversion problem

The result of uri_unescape contains bytes, not characters:
$ perl -Mutf8 -MURI::Escape -E'say utf8::is_utf8(uri_unescape shift) ? + "characters" : "bytes"' %E4%BA%8E%E6%96%AF%E5%B1%88%E8%BE%BE%E5%B0%9 +4 bytes
Perhaps you need to decode these bytes to the internal character representation and then encode them on output as you need:
$ perl -MEncode=decode -MData::Dumper -MURI::Escape -e 'print Dumper d +ecode utf8 => uri_unescape shift' %E4%BA%8E%E6%96%AF%E5%B1%88%E8%BE%B +E%E5%B0%94 $VAR1 = "\x{4e8e}\x{65af}\x{5c48}\x{8fbe}\x{5c14}";
Once you have characters instead of bytes you can encode them as you want using :encoding IOLayer or encode function from Encode module.
Sorry if my advice was wrong.