It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible. You could represent the Unicode characters as "???????" or "\15BA\15A0\1610...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what the text says. What Text::Unidecode provides is a function, unidecode(...) that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in US-ASCII characters. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Unidecode/