G'day mldvx4,

$ alias perlu
alias perlu='perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -Mautodie=:all -Mutf8 -C -E'
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There are two lines in your output that you should note. When I run your code as posted, I get:

...
<description>Feed from a to &#xC3;&#xB6;</description>
...
<title>abc...&#xC3;&#xA5;&#xC3;&#xA4;&#xC3;&#xB6;</title>
...
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When I add use utf8;, I get:

...
<description>Feed from a to &#xF6;</description>
...
<title>abc...&#xC3;&#xA5;&#xC3;&#xA4;&#xC3;&#xB6;</title>
...
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So, that's fixed the $feed->description():

$ perlu 'say chr hex "F6"'
ö
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but not the $entry->title().

Look at the difference between how you code XML::Feed->new($format) and XML::Feed::Entry->new($format). Aligning those by changing

my $entry = XML::Feed::Entry->new();
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to

my $entry = XML::Feed::Entry->new('RSS');
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I now get:

...
<description>Feed from a to &#xF6;</description>
...
<title>abc...&#xE5;&#xE4;&#xF6;</title>
...
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So, both the $feed->description() and $entry->title() are now fixed:

$ perlu 'say chr hex for qw{E5 E4 F6}'
å
ä
ö
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I'll also draw your attention to "XML::Feed: Atom feeds come out as bytes, but RSS as Unicode [rt.cpan.org #43004] #44". I haven't looked into this but it might have some relevance in relation to other XML::Feed work you may be doing.