Pardon the breach of etiquette, I am new to these forums.

By manually I meant explicitly. Here is the somewhat counter-intuitive code, where "$value" is from the hashref returned by a fetchall_hashref call:

Encode::_utf8_off($value);
$value = Encode::decode("utf8", $value);
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$value ends up being a Perl string with the utf8 flag on.

Thanks!