module providing interfaces between Perl's strings and the system

 The Encode module provides the interfaces between Perl's strings and the
 rest of the system.
 .
 When Perl is processing "binary data", the programmer wants Perl to process
 "sequences of bytes". This is not a problem for Perl - as a byte has 256
 possible values, it easily fits in Perl's much larger "logical character".
 .
 Encodes a string from Perl's internal form into ENCODING and returns a
 sequence of octets.