Wide character in print at C:\Texts\Programs/SIFX.pm line 42.

Your XML parser is working correctly (returning decoded text), but you forgot to encode the text before outputting it. An easy way of fixing that is add an encoding layer to the file handle.

open(my $fh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', ...) or die;
print($fh $text);
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use open ':std', ':encoding(UTF-8)';
print($text);
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use Encode qw( encode );
print($fh encode("UTF-8", $text));
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use Encode qw( encode );
print(encode("UTF-8", $text));
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It really bugs me because this snippet works fine:

Because Dumper encodes characters above 255 into escape sequences, hiding your bug (lack of encoding).

>perl -wle"print chr(0x2660)"
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
<junk><junk><junk>

>perl -MData::Dumper -we"print Dumper chr(0x2660)"
$VAR1 = "\x{2660}";
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I think it would help if you could provide a complete, runnable example that allows to reproduce the error.

I played around a bit, but the only thing remotely similar I managed to produce is

Cannot decode string with wide characters at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/Encode.
+pm line 166.
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when I do exactly what it complains about, i.e. pass XMLin() a string with already decoded (wide) characters...

What is line 42 in SIFX.pm, is this the line with $xml->XMLin(...)?  Your subject says it "throws decode error in encode.pm", but you show a different error (or rather warning) message...(?)

Shoot! I pasted the wrong error. I meant to say that the error printed is

Cannot decode string with wide characters at C:/Perl/lib/Encode.pm line 174.

Okay, I found a way to reduplicate it. Place the following lines in a text file and save it as utf8:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>

<etax id="{e961ee2c-a029-489a-8bf4-3c2ecef7f019}" ettx="TL-Scriptures.ettx">

<sifx>

<LEX st="Kasulatan" id="tl" chrBrk="–—" tSt="s11"/>

<LEX st="Pambungad" id="tl" chrBrk="–—" tSt="p11"/>

<LEX st="Panimula" id="tl" chrBrk="–—" tSt="h11"/>

</sifx>

The following is the module I wrote where the error occurs:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
package SIFX;
use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

sub new(){#scalar file name optional
    my $class = shift;
    my $self = 
        {
            etaxFile => '',
            SIFX => {},
        };
    bless $self, $class;
    load($self,shift) if @_ ==1;
    return $self;
}

sub load(){
    return -1 if(@_ == 0);
    my ($self, $input) = @_;
    my $sifx;
    if((substr $input, -4, 4) eq '.txt'){#if input was a file name
        $self->{etaxFile} = $input;
        open my $etax, '<utf8', $input or print "Could not open etax f
+ile at __LINE__";
        my $text;
        
        while($text ne '<sifx>'){#until beginning of SIFX
            chomp($text = <$etax>);
        }
        
        $sifx= '<sifx>';
        do{#until end of SIFX
            chomp($text = <$etax>);
            $sifx .= $text;
        }while($text !~ m#</sifx>#);
        close $etax;
    }
    else{
        $sifx = $input;
    }
    my $xml = XML::Simple->new();
    $self->{SIFX} = $xml->XMLin($sifx);
    print "SIFX hash is : ";
    print Dumper($self->{SIFX});
}
1;
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And you can test it with the following after changing the $testSifx variable to the path of the text file:

my $xml = XML::Simple->new();

my $testSifx = "C:\\Users\\nate\\Desktop\\testSIFX.txt";
my $sifx = SIFX->new($testSifx);
print Dumper($sifx);
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I apologize for the original, inadequate, inaccurate post.

As already hinted at, XMLin() doesn't like already decoded input; it wants bytes/octets.  IOW, simply open the file as

    open my $etax, '<', $input or ...
                   # ^ no :utf8
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#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple qw(:strict);

my $xs = XML::Simple->new();

my $blah = $xs->XMLin('/root/Desktop/txt.xml',
            ForceArray => 1,
            KeyAttr => 1);
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';            
print Dumper($blah);
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