Likely beyond my Perl skill level at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind. Meanwhile, I wrote a small function to fix the data. I also found code strings in the original data that we decided needed fixin', so this function might be all I need at the moment.
sub FixXML {
$parm = $_[0];
$parm =~ s/&/&/g;
$parm =~ s/>/>/g;
$parm =~ s/</</g;
$parm =~ s/"/"/g;
$parm =~ s/'/'/g;
$parm =~ s/
/\n/g;
$parm =~ s/
/\n/g;
$parm =~ s/
/\r/g;
$parm =~ s/
/\r/g;
$parm =~ s/	/\t/g;
return($parm);
}