Are you by any chance working between a Windows box and a *nix machine? Perhaps you have some nasty \r characters in your original script or XML file. Those tend to cause weirdness especially with parsing and regexes. Try:

cat -vET <file>
[download]

The \r will show up as ^M at the end of lines before the $ characters(those command-line options cause cat to mark the end of each line with a $).

HTH