This subject is discussed in the Perl XML FAQ. Given that you don't know what encoding(s?) the original data used, you might find the 'sanitise' function in the FAQ useful.

I regularly hit this problem when people paste stuff from MSWord since the 'smart quote' characters are not in the ISO-8859-1 set.

In reply to Re: Generating UTF-8 from nasty high ASCII input by grantm
in thread Generating UTF-8 from nasty high ASCII input by samtregar

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