RTF is fundamentally a ANSI text file. A character set specification is used to set the code page used and may be one of:

However the encoded characters you show suggests that the code page being used is compatible with cp1252 (the wikipedia article's mention of cp1256 is misleading and wrong as far as I can tell). The following may be the voodoo you are looking for:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

my $x = "foo à, è, ì, ò, ù bar";
my $x1 = encode('cp1252', $x);

$x1 =~ s<([\x00-\x1F\x7F-\xFF])> <"\\'" .(unpack("H2",$1))>eg;

print $x1;

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True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re: What Voodoo Encoding does RTF use for > ASCII Chars? by GrandFather
in thread What Voodoo Encoding does RTF use for > ASCII Chars? by tosh

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