$ perl -CSDA -MEncode -MXML::Parser -E'XML::Parser->new(Handlers => { Char => sub { print "$_[1]" } })->parse(encode($ARGV[0], qq{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="$ARGV[0]"?><root>\xC9ric\n</root>}));' iso-8859-1
Éric

$ perl -CSDA -MEncode -MXML::Parser -E'XML::Parser->new(Handlers => { Char => sub { print "$_[1]" } })->parse(encode($ARGV[0], qq{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="$ARGV[0]"?><root>\xC9ric\n</root>}));' UTF-8
Éric

##</code><code>##

use Devel::Peek;
Dump($s);

##</code><code>##

{
   use Data::Dumper;
   local $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1;
   print(Dumper($s));
}