E acute is in ISO-8859-1, perhaps it is not right encoded? From the XML::Parser documentation: "The built-in encodings are: UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, UTF-16, and US-ASCII." so this is not the case that ISO-8859-1 is not handled by the parser.

By the way when you make it UTF-8 and it claims to be ISO-8859-1 you don't fix anything.