Show us some code that exhibits the problems.

Update: Ok, not a character encoding problem at all, please ignore the rest.

I'd expect XML::Parser to return decoded text strings, so you'd have to encode them in the character encoding you want before printing. This might be as simple as adding

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
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at the start of your program.

See also: character encodings and perl, Encode, perluniintro, perlunicode.