One way you do this is pick two special characters. Pick ones that aren't likely to be used often like "\030" and "\031". Now do this:

my %codes = ("\031" => "\030\001", "\031" => "\030\001");
foreach $item (@items) {

  $item =~s/(\031|\030)/$codes{$1)/ge;
  print FILE $item."\031";
}
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Now the only "\030"s that appear in the file are the record seperators and you do a simple match like that one to restore the occasional encoded values.

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