$_ = "<p>text comes here </p><p>text within after in  attorney’s 
+fees,  Inc’s principle</p>";

s/<[^>]+>//g;
s/[^[:ascii:]]+//g;

print;
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When using regular expressions i don't know the exact special character to match.

(naikonta already told you 'bout HTML tags.) This all depends on how special the charachters you want to exclude really are. What do you want? ASCII only? And if so, then what's to be of the excluded charachters? Are you just stripping them? Do you want to encode them some way?

If you're using perl 5.8, then use the module Encode (the function decode, that would be my first guess) that comes with it.

And don't just strip accented characters, you're replacing one kind of error with another. I have no objection to dumbing down special quote-like characters, to plaing double quotes and apostrophes. (I'm guessing "Â " actually represents a nbsp, which you can safely replace with plain spaces.)

Hi monks, First of all thanks for the suggestions. I tried the following code from the links which are provided by you monks:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Encode qw( _utf8_on );

my $resume = "”";
print $resume, "\n";

_utf8_on($resume);

print $resume, "\n";
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When i execute the above code it gives me the same output in both print statements. I want the corresponding special character for the $resume variable. Please correct me if i am wrong in the above code. Thanks.

I want the corresponding special character for the $resume variable.

I don't understand what that means. Can you explain more carefully what you really want? Also, can you please try to be more clear about what is being assigned as the value of $resume?

It actually seems that you are assigning a three-byte value:  "\xE2\x80\x9D" -- this happens to be interpretable as the utf8 encoding for the unicode character U+201D "RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK". Do you want to replace this with the ASCII double-quote character?

my $resume = "\x{201D}";
print "$resume\n";

$resume =~ s/\x{201d}/"/g;
print "$resume\n";
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(updated to make sure the s/// applies to the value of $resume)

To do that sort of replacement in a "general" sense (i.e. replace all "wide-character" versions of punctuation marks with ASCII versions of same wherever possible), you probably want Text::Unidecode:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Text::Unidecode;

my $resume = "\x{201d}";
print unidecode( $resume ), "\n";
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