Now that is weird. There's a 0xF3 in there, but the UTF-8 flag is on? 0xF3 0x6E is not a valid UTF-8 sequence. 0xF3 indicates the start of a four-byte wide character (four highest bits set, then a zero bit to terminate the sequence, and 3 bits of payload), but 0x6E means this character it's not part of a sequence (highest bit is zero). That's invalid.

So the input never actually gets converted to UTF-8, but someone is still flipping the UTF-8 flag on it. And Perl does not complain when printing the string. Weird. Seems like something is rather amiss there. Whether that is the cause for the less-than character you're seeing on the console for some reason is anyone's guess. Assuming these are somewhat older versions of Perl and XML::Simple, maybe you ought to check whether newer ones act consistently.

I don't really have any suggestions, I'm afraid, I'm kind of at a loss.

Makeshifts last the longest.