Manually Upgrading Strings to UTF-8 

use Encode;

use Devel::Peek;

my $data = "Euro \xE2\x82\xAC";

$data = decode('utf8', $data);

Dump($data);

• Output:

SV = PV(0x814cb00) at 0x814c6b4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x820a2a8 "Euro \342\202\254"\0 [UTF8 "Euro \x{20ac}"]
  CUR = 8
  LEN = 9