I see now I was using wrong input to perl string

$ perl -e" binmode STDOUT,q!:encoding(UTF-8)!; print qq!\N{U+00E9}!" |
+od -tx1
0000000 c3 a9
0000002

$ perl -e" binmode STDOUT,q!:encoding(UTF-8)!; print qq!\xE9!" |od -tx
+1
0000000 c3 a9
0000002

$ perl -e" binmode STDOUT,q!:encoding(UTF-8)!; print qq!\x{00E9}!" |od
+ -tx1
0000000 c3 a9
0000002

$ perl -e" binmode STDOUT,q!:encoding(UTF-8)!; print qq!\x{C3A9}!" |od
+ -tx1
0000000 ec 8e a9
0000003
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You could have avoided my nonsense if you provided code in in Re^4: XML:: DOM and Accented Characters, thanks :)