How can I become universal utf/unicode

I don't know where else to post this question.

I'm already using LWP::UserAgent and HTML::Parser and successfully fetch and 
parse documents without problem. However, I would like to be universal. I'm 
using Perl 5.8.3 with the latest HTML::Parser as of today.

Sometimes when fetching a document you have no idea the encoding and 
sometimes you do. What I want to know is how do I convert the incoming Web 
page regardless of encoding to UTF-8 as well as encode entities to something 
like Aacute (for keyword matching)?

Maybe I'm stupid because I've tried everything I can think of as well as 
following some examples I've found and no matter what I do, it just doesn't 
work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
John

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