my $record = "a" . $record; # prepend the ID of the default charset
my @parts = split /\x1B/, $record;
foreach my $part (@parts) {
 my $charset = substr( $part,0,1,'');
 $charset = $ESC{$charset}; # to get the name from the id
 $part = decode( $charset, $part);
}
$record = join '', @parts;