Why do you have a string named $xml which is assigned the output of Data::Dumper?

Note that, as I already said, Data::Dumper likely doesn't output characters above 127 but instead outputs Perl code that's roughly equivalent.

You most likely want to construct your strings differently.

What is the actual content of $data?

Maybe you want to re-read SSCCE (which I misspelled earlier, sorry) to give us some more concrete code, data and output to work with.