I have a unicore/html_alias.pl (amongst others) to be use in conjunction with the charnames pragma, like this:

use charnames ":alias" => ":html";
print "\N{pound}\N{sup2}"'
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It’ll probably make it into the 5.15 development cycle. The start of it looks like this:

###############################################################
#
# File "html_alias.pl" containing aliases for use with 
#
#   use charnames ":alias" => ":html";
#
# Each section in table below is grouped and sorted not by alias
# name but rather so one can visually locate a desired character.
# 
# To view table sorted by key, see unused DATA section below.
#
###############################################################

use utf8;
use strict;
use warnings qw[ FATAL all ];

# "return" is to quiet perl -wc

return (

# Number aliases: these are \p{Other_Number}
      "sup1" => "SUPERSCRIPT ONE",                  # ¹ U+00B9
      "sup2" => "SUPERSCRIPT TWO",                  # ² U+00B2
      "sup3" => "SUPERSCRIPT THREE",                # ³ U+00B3
    "frac12" => "VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF",        # ½ U+00BD
    "frac14" => "VULGAR FRACTION ONE QUARTER",     # ¼ U+00BC
    "frac34" => "VULGAR FRACTION THREE QUARTERS",  # ¾ U+00BE

# Currency sign aliases: \p{Currency_Symbol}

    "curren" => "CURRENCY SIGN",                   # ¤ U+00A4
      "cent" => "CENT SIGN",                       # ¢ U+00A2
     "pound" => "POUND SIGN",                      # £ U+00A3
       "yen" => "YEN SIGN",                        # ¥ U+00A5
      "euro" => "EURO SIGN",                       # € U+20AC
[download]

Does that look useful to you?