Might you be able to use the tools recode or iconv? Recode is available on GNU/Linux-UNIX and on Windows. I don't know about iconv's availabilty on anything other than GNU/Linux, but it might have been ported to Windows by now.

You could use these to prepare your files for actual processing with Perl.

Update: PodMaster has just pointed out to me that there is a CPAN module interface for iconv available. Check it out.

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Allolex