use LWP::UserAgent;
use XML::Simple;
use Encode qw(encode decode);
use warnings;
use strict;

...

my $content;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $request = HTTP::Request->new("GET",$url);
unless ($skipAuth){
  $request->authorization_basic($user, $pass);
}
$ua->prepare_request($request);
my $response = $ua->send_request($request);
if ($pageFormat eq "xml"){
  $content = XMLin($response->decoded_content((charset => "utf8")));
}
else { #txt
  $content = $response->decoded_content((charset => "utf8"));  

  #Prints UTF-8 as expected.
  print "CONTENT CHARSET " . $response->content_charset() . "\n\n";
  
  #All of the below statements print the BOM as literal characters to the Windows CMD screen
  print "CONTENT: " . $response->content() . "\n";
  print "DECODED CONTENT: " . $response->decoded_content() . "\n";
  print "DECODED CONTENT WITH UTF-8 SPECIFIED: " . $response->decoded_content((charset => "utf8")) . "\n";
  print "MANUALLY DECODED: " . decode("UTF-8", $response->content());
}

##</code><code>##

open(RESULT, ">result.txt");
print RESULT $content;
close(RESULT);