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 decoded result or throw an exception. For the cases where you want to allow invalid characters or byte sequences, encode_lax and decode_lax are provided.
Encode itself supports many more operations such as partial, mixed, and in-place encoding or decoding, where its options may make more sense, but these uncommon use cases are not supported by Encode::Simple.
As a final note, if you are working strictly with UTF-8, I suggest avoiding Encode entirely and using the excellent Unicode::UTF8, or the related filehandle layer :utf8_strict, for fast and correct encoding and decoding.
Since the original publication of this post, Encode::Simple has added encode_utf8 and decode_utf8 functions that directly use Unicode::UTF8 if installed.
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