Two things that are still unclear to me from your description are whether you've got use utf8; for code like $_table{'Ö'} (or if that was just an example here), and whether your strings containing Unicode are properly decoded or not - please show one of your strings using Dump from Devel::Peek, and show an SSCCE that reproduces your situation.
In any case, a regex that matches non-ASCII characters (or bytes, depending on whether your string is decoded or not) is /([^\x00-\x7F])/.
Minor edits.
In reply to Re: Substitute some Unicodes with their escapes
by haukex
in thread Substitute some Unicodes with their escapes
by jjmoka
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |