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;
[download]

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);
[download]

I apologize for the original, inadequate, inaccurate post.