If you're using XML, you will have to deal with unicode.

Pretending you don't will only make things harder.

All XML parsing modules for perl will give your perl code utf-8 encoded data.

Use the latest perl 5.8.x you can find, read perluniintro.pod and go from there.

In your case, the only thing you'll have to do is indicate the encoding that you want your output in, using the 3-argument form of open() or binmode() if you're printing to an already opened filehandle.