I was looking for a module to convert not only a single string to UTF-8 but a nested data structure. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything appropriate so I had to write something for my own. The following is a works-for-me solution I came up with but I'm sure you'll find enough bugs and proposals for me to be ashamed of this procedure. So be gentle ;) 
use Encode;
sub digConvert
{
    my $ref = shift;
    if (ref $ref eq 'HASH') {
        foreach (keys %$ref) {
            $ref->{$_} = digConvert($ref->{$_});
        }
    } elsif (ref $ref eq 'ARRAY') {
        foreach my $i (0 .. $#{$ref}) {
            $ref->[$i] = digConvert($ref->[$i]);
        }
    } elsif (ref $ref eq '' && $ref) {
        # don't upset XML parser
        # problably more to come
        $ref =~ s/&/&/g;
        $ref = Encode::encode_utf8($ref);
    } else {
        ### something I missed?
    }
    return $ref;
}

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but tie your camel

In reply to convert UTF-8 in nested data structures by slayven

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