Just a few performance remarks

• alternating on characters in a regex is not the way to go, use a character class.
• for single character 1:1 replacements I'd use tr///
• evaluation of the substituted values can be avoided
• drop the useless /m modifier (which changes the behaviour of ^ and $, which you are not using anyway)

Having said that, here is my version of the substitutions in show - for a more general (and quicker) approach I use a hash:

BEGIN {
  my %mapping = (
    "\t"   => ' -> ',
    " "    => chr(0267),
    "\n"   => chr(0266)."\n",
    "\266" => '%B6',
    "\267" => '%B7',
  );

  my $pattern = qr/([@{[join '', keys %mapping]}])/;

  sub show {
    my @data = @_;
    s/$pattern/$mapping{$1}/g for (@data);
    return wantarray ? @data : join'',@data;
  }
}
[download]

-- Hofmator

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