#! /usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; my %mydatatoshow = ( "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA}" => "\\\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA}", '\\x{3b1}' => '\\\\x{3b2}', ); binmode STDERR, ':encoding(UTF-8)'; print STDERR Dumper(\%mydatatoshow); print STDERR Dumper(\%mydatatoshow) =~ s/\\x\{([0-9a-f]{2,})\}/chr(hex($1))/ger;