Encode::Unicode -- Various Unicode Transformation Formats
use Encode qw/encode decode/;
$ucs2 = encode("UCS-2BE", $utf8);
$utf8 = decode("UCS-2BE", $ucs2);
This module implements all Character Encoding Schemes of Unicode that are officially documented by Unicode Consortium (except, of course, for UTF-8, which is a native format in perl).