use charnames      qw( :full );  # For \N on older Perls
use Encode         qw( encode decode );
use HTML::Entities qw( encode_entities );

my $utf8_text = encode('UTF-8', "a\N{U+00E9}\N{U+2660} 1<4");
my $utf8_html = encode('UTF-8', "a\N{U+00E9}\N{U+2660} <b>foo</b>");