The conversion can be done with module Text::Iconv. The following worked on my machine (Win XP), though I found you have to be very careful to give the precise character set names in line 4.

use strict;
use Text::Iconv;
my $unicodetext = <IN>; # or whatever
my $utf2ascii= new Text::Iconv( 'UTF-8', 'ASCII') or die "Can't make c
+onverter";
my $asciitext = $utf2ascii->convert($text);
print "$asciitext\n";
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