encode

$obj->encode($string [, $check]) - a character string to UTF-16/32 or UCS-2 octets.

With no fixed byte order (UTF-16, UTF-32) the output starts with a big-endian BOM. Characters above U+FFFF become surrogate pairs in UTF-16; in UCS-2, and anything above U+10FFFF, they become U+FFFD - or croak with FB_CROAK, or warn with FB_WARN. A partial UTF-8 character at the end croaks when CHECK has DIE_ON_ERR or LEAVE_SRC.