I regularly get a batch of HTML containing information about Latin music. I'm having some problems making sure the non-English characters in that data don't get whacked. Perhaps pertinent, perhaps not, I'm running this on Windows XP with ActivePerl 5.8. This is a test example of the data:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>
<data>
<title>Más Y Más</title>
<artist>La Unión</artist>
</data>
[download]

Here's the code I'm testing:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

undef $/;
open( FH, shift );

my $raw_file = <FH>;

my $xml = XMLin( $raw_file, 
                  forcearray => [],
                 suppressempty => undef 
               );

print Dumper ( $xml );
print $xml->{'artist'};
print "\n";
[download]

I pass the data file to the script and the output is this:

$VAR1 = {
          'artist' => "La Uni\x{f3}n",
          'title' => "M\x{e1}s Y M\x{e1}s"
        };
[download]

La Uni≤n

So, the dumped data at least has the hex equivalents of the non-English characters in it. The print, however, has done some conversion that I'm not sure about. In any event, this ends up as pretty much junk data. I'm sure there's a simple conversion I'm missing here. I've butted my head up against Unicode::String for awhile, but the results were never satisfactory.
Any wisdom is very much appreciated.
Regards,
SheridanCat

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