use Encode qw/decode is_utf8/;
use Unicode::Normalize;

# let $string be value that was just fetched from a utf8 database field,
#  in which case, you will most likely need to do this:

$string = decode( "utf8", $string );

# or just for testing, comment out the previous line, and
# $string = join( "", map{chr()} 0xc0..0xff ); # uncomment this line

# NFD normalization splits off all diacritic marks as separate code points
# and these "combining" marks for latin are in the U0300-U036F range

( $string_nd = NFD( $string )) =~ tr/\x{300}-\x{36f}//d;

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";   # just to be sure this has been done

print "original: << $string >>\n";
print "  edited: << $string_nd >>\n";