I agree with bartmoritz. Due to some properties of UTF-8, it's very unlikely that cp1252-encoded text would be valid UTF-8*. 

use Encode qw( decode );

my $bytes = '...';
my $txt;
if (!eval {
   $txt = decode('UTF-8', $bytes, Encode::FB_CROAK|Encode::LEAVE_SRC);
   1  # No exception
}) {
   $txt = decode('Windows-1252', $bytes);
}

[download]

* — Unless the encoded text contains no bytes above 0x7F, in which case it doesn't matter if you treat it as Windows-1252 or UTF-8.

In reply to Re: What's the best way to detect character encodings, Windows-1252 v. UTF-8? by ikegami
in thread What's the best way to detect character encodings, Windows-1252 v. UTF-8? by Jim

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