While not a solution, I believe the control characters you are referring to a back-spaces to allow _O_P_T_I_O_N to appear as OPTION

Update: Are your man pages already processed in some way? The source for man pages on my system have formatting codes rather than control characters.

REs are definately not my strong point, but, if you only need to deal with the control H's and backspaces, how about after reading the man file into an array (i.e., @manlines) and then using something like:

map { s/\cH|[\b]//g } @manlines;
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