Thanks for the advices. But you said:

... it has the nice feature of not requiring the Encode module (important if the script might be run with older versions of Perl),...

Note that I can't use this REGEX on Perl-5.6.1, since the range of \x is much bigger than 255! This is why I put it inside eval(), or it won't compile.

Graciliano M. P.
"The creativity is the expression of the liberty".