Where you repeat $cell1 =~ s/^\s+|\s+//g; I would suggest instead that you create a subroutine (or two) to strip the white space and any problematic characters and then pass each value to that subroutine.

Have a look at the docs on Regular Expression Character Classes. For example, if the problem character is a control character then you can use the [:cntrl:] character class to remove it.

foreach my $row ($ts->rows) {
    @$row = map { clean_text( $_ ) } @$row;
    #...
}

#...
my $cell1=$te->rows->[$rowIndex][1];
clean_text( $cell1 );
#...

sub clean_text {
    # remove all control characters
    $_[0] =~ s/[[:cntrl:]]+//g;
    
    # remove white space at start/end
    $_[0] =~ s/^\s+//;
    $_[0] =~ s/\s+$//;
    
    # or remove all white space
    $_[0] =~ s/\s+//g;
}
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