Hi, it's every time a headache, if you handle content without knowledge of the correct encoding. The module Encode::Guess will help you a little bit, but the interface is horrible. If it matches a charset, it gives an object, if it's not sure, it delivers a string like "iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15". Argl!

Try to get the encoding by any other way than guessing. Read the HTTP-Header or is there an HTML-Head-Encoding-Tag? Since many years, I worked with many charsets, there are so many things gone, till I strictly get the encoding information separately.

To transform the data fro one charset to another, the Encode module will help with things like this:

from_to($content, "iso-8859-1", "utf8");