If there are special chars within a string, it might be better to encode this value with MIME::Base64, e.g.

use MIME::Base64 ();
my $encodedPassword = MIME::Base64::encode_base64($password);
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If this still doesn't work, there might be a wrong codepage. Use Encode to convert the value to utf8 before converting with MIME::Base64, e.g if your script's data uses iso-8859-1, try something like:

use Encode ();
Encode::from_to($password, "iso-8859-1", "utf8");
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But I'd really use Net::LDAP for this task...

(If you want to read from Active Directory, you need to encode to 'iso-8859-1' and use LDAP Version 2 for not to get problems with special chars