Thank you for this. I'm trying to capture some table data and the $#160 source elements (which are translated to nbsp elements when inspecting the HTML::Element as_HTML() output) come through in HTML::Element's as_text() method as weird characters, and I couldn't figure out how to clean them with regexes. Now I just

my $el =  $_->as_text();
my $nbsp = chr(160);
$el =~ s/$nbsp/ /g;
[download]

and all is well :)