Unicode to UTF-8

Hello.

I am currently populating html pages with content from MS Excel. I am 
using a Java program that literally places the Excel content directly 
into the output code (which is saved as html). It appears that Excel 
is using Unicode characters, which is causing strange glyphs when the 
html is viewed in a browser. Is there a Perl Way to parse the output 
and replace the Unicode characters with asciii, or UTF-8 equivalents? 
And do I need to upgrade to perl 5.6 to do this?
Thanks,

Rick Dillon