Removing accents from 2 byte characters in ASCII string - perl

Question

I am reading data from server which is returned as JSON and parsed using JSON::Parse. The JSON data includes accented characters such as é. These are encoded in the output strings as 2 byte characters such as \xc3\xa9. The rest of the string is standard 1 byte ASCII characters.
How can I remove the accents from these characters? I have tried all of the following methods without success:
use Unicode::Normalize;
use utf8;
use Text::Iconv;
use Encode qw(from_to);
use Text::Unidecode;
sub normalise_text {
my $text = shift;
my $decomposed = NFKD( $text );
$decomposed =~ s/\p{NonspacingMark}//g;
return $decomposed;
}
sub convert {
my $converter = Text::Iconv->new("utf16", "utf8");
return $converter->convert($_);
}
sub fromto {
return from_to($_, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
}
These libraries tend to convert each character on a byte by byte basis which is no good. For the short term, I am doing the conversion as follows:
sub mine {
my $text = $_;
$text =~ s/\xc3\xa9/e/g;
$text =~ s/\xc3\xa1/a/g;
return $text;
}
There must be a better way! Any suggestions?