G'day Bill,

"I did not know what unicode character the \x96 was meant to represent."

A quick way to determine this is via "Unicode Character Code Charts" — it has "Find chart by hex code:" near the top of the page.

[Aside: Although that's a standard URL, I noted, when checking it, that it has: "Unicode 15.0 Character Code Charts". I thought that I'd just mention that Perl does a pretty good job of supporting the latest Unicode versions. Perl v5.36.0 (released in May this year) supports Unicode 14.0 (the current version at the time); if you're desperate for 15.0 support, it was added in v5.37.5 (or just wait for 5.38.0 to be released in May next year, or thereabouts).]

That will give you the name, <control>, and the informative alias, START OF GUARDED AREA; you can use the latter in \N{}.

$ perl -E 'say sprintf "%x", ord("\N{START OF GUARDED AREA}")'
96
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In a script or one-liner, you can use Unicode::UCD, but it's not always straightforward. Compare:

$ perl -MUnicode::UCD=charinfo -E 'say charinfo(0x34)->{name}'
DIGIT FOUR

$ perl -MUnicode::UCD=charinfo -E 'say charinfo(0x34)->{unicode10} || 
+"<blank>"'
<blank>

$ perl -MUnicode::UCD=charinfo -E 'say charinfo(0x96)->{name}'
<control>

$ perl -MUnicode::UCD=charinfo -E 'say charinfo(0x96)->{unicode10} || 
+"<blank>"'
START OF GUARDED AREA
[download]