Абстрактный адаптер аллюзий

А не лучше ли применить вот это? (из man perlunicode)

==={{{

       "use encoding" needed to upgrade non-Latin-1 byte strings
           By default, there is a fundamental asymmetry in Perl's unicode
           model: implicit upgrading from byte strings to Unicode strings
           assumes that they were encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), but Unicode
           strings are downgraded with UTF-8 encoding.  This happens because
           the first 256 codepoints in Unicode happens to agree with Latin-1.

           If you wish to interpret byte strings as UTF-8 instead, use the
           "encoding" pragma:

               use encoding 'utf8';

           See "Byte and Character Semantics" for more details.

===}}}

Конечно, лучше сделать чтобы вообще не было implicit upgrading, но это может оказаться проблемой сторонних модулей вроде DBI/DBD.