I encountered this problem (before I knew about it :-( ) too.

I'd like to point out that if you only work with one language (in the XML input and in your output) it's very easy to bypass this using Text::Iconv - I did it as a simple conversion sub that I called for outputting data from the XML. I guess this could be done with a handler too, but I haven't tried it yet.

Here's my sub:

sub unUTF8 {
    my $conv = Text::Iconv->new("UTF-8", "iso-8859-8"); #That's hebrew
+.
    return $conv->convert(shift);
}
[download]