Do you mean that you have plaintext, and want to entize everything? Like so:

my $str = "perlmonks";
print map { "&#$_;" } unpack 'C*', $str;

__END__

perlmonks
[download]

Not sure what "i won't use ord" means, but this would seem to satisfy that odd requirement. Assuming your "NORMAL" == ASCII, then this works. If you have unicode, then you need 'U*' as your unpack template.

Update: Your response to the post above suggests that you don't want this. You possibly want the reverse. Incidentally, the word "normal" is meaningless when it comes to data encoding.