Encodings in Perl are still very hard to manage. In fact, I am a co-author of XML::DT (a down-translation parser for XML files) and to get encodings working correctly in perl versions prior to 5.7.1 (Encode.pm limit) and past, it a hard task. Specially because code working with versions previous than 5.7.1 does not work on recent perl.
But, we managed to get a sollution... five or six versions to do that (waiting for cpan testers!).
