You will probably want a string substitution of some sort, using s/ä/a/g (or s/\x{e4}/a/g, where \x{NNNNN} is the accented character's Unicode code point). tr/ä/a/ might be a better choice, but this depends on exactly what you're trying to do. However, here be dragons: perldoc perluniintro and related docs for the gory details of encoding schemes, Unicode and locales.