Ere Maijala writes > # Fix non-UTF-8 characters with two highest bits set (we assume they > are actually ISO-8859-1) What about use Encode::Guess qw/latin-1/; $decoded=decode("Guess", $dodgy_input); $decoded then should be a utf-8 string with utf8 flag on. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel