The -l option to perl will auto-chomp input lines and put the appropriate line-ending on output lines.

Does this give you something like what you want to see, as far as making unprintable characters viewable?

while (<>) {
  s/([\000-\037])/'^'.chr(ord($1)+0100)/ge;
  s/\0177/^?/g;
  s/([\200-\377])/sprintf"M-%o", ord($1)/ge;
  print;
}
[download]