So, I found this which converts non-matched UTF-8 characters to something: http://linuxgazette.net/117/tag/4.html

So basically, the code would be something like:

# Converted UTF codes for non-matching ISO-8859-1
# Strip it down to basic ASCII
%utf_entity = (
    "\x{2019}",    "'",
    "\x{201c}",    '"',
    "\x{201d}",    '"',
    "\x{2026}",    "...",
        "\x{fffd}",     "",
);
s/(\X)/ exists $utf_entity{$1} ? $utf_entity{$1} : $1 /eg;
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I was going to recommend passing only characters that don't exist in iso-latin-1 to unidecode using a fallback handler to encode. It works, but I'm getting an error (Close with partial character.) when the file handle is closed, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Here's the code anyway:

use strict;
use warnings;

use PerlIO::encoding qw( );
use Text::Unidecode  qw( unidecode );

use constant FB_UNIDECODE => sub { unidecode(chr($_[0])) };

my $file = '...';

local $PerlIO::encoding::fallback = FB_UNIDECODE;
open(my $fh, '>:encoding(iso-8859-1)', $file)
   or die("Unable to create file \"$file\": $!\n");

print $fh "abc\x{201C}def\x{2013}ghi";
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Dear ikegami,

This is exactly what I wanted :)

It's absolutely brilliant to think about using the fallback handler.

I don't get the error (Close with partial character.) which u mentioned though.

Many thanks again :)