Thanks ikegami. I was able to use those tips with XML::LibXML to get what I wanted.

Now I need to figure out why XML::LibXML changed a completely different part of the xml document. There's a description string elsewhere in the document and it converted an html entity (') to a single quote. I already set expand_entities to 0 so I'm not wtf is up with that... ugh... I mean it's technically correct and probably won't break anything, but I'd rather it not touch anything I didn't ask it to touch.