Yes, ^ does work on strings, but as the OP mentioned, it works on the string's bytes, not the hexadecimal numbers encoded in the string.

$ perl -E"say '112233'^'aabbcc'"
PPPPPP

$ perl -E"say sprintf '%x', 0x112233 ^ 0xaabbcc"
bb99ff

[download]

My code gives the latter behaviour (which the OP wants) on hexadecimal strings of arbitrary length.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^5: Hex String XOR by tobyink
in thread Hex String XOR by alanonymous

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