This might solve the problem for you.

#!/usr/bin/perl -slw

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;
use Test::utf8;
use Test::More tests => 9;

my $str1 = "\340isTheWord - special character changes case.";
my $str2 = "\300istheword - special character changes case.";
my($str3)= ($str1, $str2,
    "$str1/$str2 - special character changes case" );

my $num_octets1 = utf8::upgrade($str1);
my $num_octets2 = utf8::upgrade($str2);
my $num_octets3 = utf8::upgrade($str3);

is_valid_string( $str1 );
is_valid_string( $str2 );
is_valid_string( $str3 );
is_sane_utf8( $str1 );
is_sane_utf8( $str2 );
is_sane_utf8( $str3 );
is_within_latin_1( $str1 );
is_within_latin_1( $str2 );
is_within_latin_1( $str3 );
binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
print beautify($str3);

sub beautify {
    my ($in) = @_;
    my $tmp;
    foreach $_ ( split( /\s/o, lc($in), 1 ) ) {
        $tmp .= ucfirst;
        $tmp .= ' ';
    }
    $tmp =~ s/\s$//;
    return $tmp;
}
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