I know you said that you'd rather not use another module, but considering that it's probably already in use by a module that you use in framechat, think about using URI::Escape. Something like: 
$xml=uri_escape($xml,"\x80-\xff");

[download]
should preserve the hi-bit characters without making XML::Simple barf, right? (It seems to work correctly with pmchat).

Update: Duh, right: HTML entities != HTTP Escaped characters.

In reply to Re: Unescaped entities in XML by mr.nick
in thread Regex to encode entities in XML by epoptai

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