Don't work with the data in its encoded form. Decode the file when you read them. 
open(my $fh1, '<:encoding(cp1252)', 'file1.txt')
open(my $fh2, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', 'file2.txt')

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Guessing at the encoding of the file since you didn't specify.

In reply to Re: One bird, two Unicode names by ikegami
in thread One bird, two Unicode names by RCH

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