Hello all,

Thanks to those which help me shed some light on this subject. In the end the triumph went to keeping things "fairly" simple.

To encode the UTF text for storage in the cp1252 database

.
.
.
use Unicode::String;

my $utf_string = [some string which is UTF8];
my $encased_string = Unicode::String->new($utf_string);
my $data_for_database = $encased_string->hex();

# For better space savings...
$data_for_database =~ s/U\+//g;
[download]

for decoding the data back from the db

my $encoded_string = [string data from db saved from previous step];
my $encased_string = Unicode::String->new();
$encased_string->hex($encoded_string);
my $utf8_string = Encode::decode_utf8($encased_string->utf8());
[download]

Thanks all for your help,

Joe