# Let's pretend you have the troublesome string returned by your
# DB, and that string is stored in a variable called "$db_string".
# (if it's actually stored in a variable called "$x", you
# could adapt it to this snippet by adding the line:
#   my $db_string = $x;

my @db_chars = ();

for my $db_char ( split //, $db_string ) {
    push @db_chars, sprintf( "%02x", ord( $db_char ));
}
for my $db_char ( @db_chars ) {
    printf "== %s == %s ==\n", $db_char, chr(hex($db_char));
}

##</code><code>##

for my $db_char ( @db_chars[0..14] ) {
 ...