I don't see the problem here. You have \xC2\x96 (2 bytes) in your XML data, which is the correct UTF-8 encoding for U+0096, and indeed your code's output properly shows that: 

0x73
0x75
0x72
0x65
0x20
0x96 <-- there it is
0x20
0x42
0x6C
0x61
0x63
0x6B

[download]
print "$str\n\n"; is a mistake, though. You shouldn't print unicode text data without specifying an output :encoding on the filehandle, or encode()ing it manually.

By the way, instead of the confusing, error-prone, and tedious process of figuring out the internal state of a variable using is_utf8 and a normal print, please use Devel::Peek instead. Its Dump function, called with your $str, would output: 

SV = PV(0x8641d2c) at 0x82ea98c
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x8631050 "sure \302\226 Black"\0 [UTF8 "sure \x{96} Black"]
  CUR = 13
  LEN = 16

[download]
As you can see, the "UTF8 flag" is on. The logical unicode string is within [UTF8 ... ], after the representation of the internal byte buffer.

Now, of course, the usefulness of the character U+0096, "START OF GUARDED AREA" is a rather different story. It probably is the result of mis-interpreting Windows-1251 data as ISO-8859-1 data. Windows-1251's 0x96 character is U+2013, "EN DASH", not U+0096.

In reply to Re: How to deal with malformed utf8 from XML parsing by Juerd
in thread How to deal with malformed utf8 from XML parsing by ribasushi

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.