use HTML::Entities qw( decode_entities _decode_entities );

print(HTML::Entities->VERSION(), "\n");

# Not really, but good enough and avoids warning.
binmode(STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)');

my $x = "ř";
_decode_entities($x, {});
print("$x\n");

print(decode_entities("ř"), "\n");

##</code><code>##

>c:\progs\perl580\bin\perl script.pl
1.23
&#345;
&#345;

>c:\progs\perl588\bin\perl script.pl
1.32
[some char]
[some char]