Encode is a well known core module in Perl with support for encoding and decoding text from almost any character encoding you can think of. But it's also an old module with a large amount of historical cruft.

With inspiration from #perl on freenode IRC, Encode::Simple is an attempt to at least improve on its interface and usability issues. Rather than an awkward and unintuitive bitmask and the option of clobbering the input data, Encode::Simple exports straightforward encode and decode functions that simply return the encoded or de…