I think you might be looking for the solution others provided me just recently for almost the exact same issue. In my case, the trick turned out to be a two-step process. You will find the details to the solution here:

The crux of it was this:

$mytext =~ s!\\x(..)!chr(hex($1))!ge;

my $newcode = decode('utf8', $mytext);
[download]

Note the substitution followed by the decode.