Isn't this funny...I'm responding to myself and solving my problem. I hope that this information will show up on search engines to save others the time that this parser behavior cost me.

I have found out that the actual CData string that I want is stored in the second child node of my parent child element.

Here's a modified snippet from what I found.

my @ch = $root->getElementsByTagName("child");

my $type = $ch[0]->nodeType;
my $val = $ch[0]->firstChild->nodeValue;
my $type2 = ($ch[0]->childNodes)[1]->nodeType;
my $val2 = ($ch[0]->childNodes)[1]->nodeValue;
print $type."\n";
print $val."\n";
print $type2."\n";
print $val2."\n";
print "val Length = ".length($val)."\n";
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