The following is based on an od.pl script I did some time ago. It does not handle Unicode characters, but I'm not sure you need that:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $var = "Some random text.\nMore\nEven More\n";
print process_text($var),"\n";

sub process_text {
    my $input = shift;

    # Get a space between each char
    my @text = split //,$input;
    local $" = ' ';
    my $text = "@text";
    
    # Table of special characters
    my %trans = ("\n" => '\n',
                 "\t" => '\t',
                 "\b" => '\b',
                 "\r" => '\r',
                 "\f" => '\f');

    my $pattern = join ('|', keys %trans);
    
    # substitute special characters
    $text =~ s/($pattern)/$trans{$1}/g;
    return $text;
}
[download]

Produces:

S o m e   r a n d o m   t e x t . \n M o r e \n E v e n   M o r e \n
[download]