#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Encode;
use Encode::Guess;

my $data='pâté';
#my $data='pate';

my $enc = guess_encoding($data, qw/ascii utf8 utf16 iso-8859-1/);
ref($enc) or die "Can't guess: $enc"; # trap error this way
#my $utf8 = $enc->decode($data);
# or
my $utf8 = decode($enc->name, $data);

print $utf8,"\n\n";