Rhesa, thanks for the Unicode::Guess module. I thought I'd poured over all the Encode namespace, but I missed that one. ikegami, thanks for letting me know what I'm in for. I had guessed that worst case scenario I was going to be doing a lot of eval's for thrown errors when using the wrong encoding. And since no human will be part of the process and I don't have any statistics, identifying a latin capital A with diaresis vs a greek capital delta will probably be impossible. The best I can hope for is to minimize the unintelligible characters.