I am a bit confused by your logic here. First you apply the toHash function which returns a hash reference. But then you use Dumper to stringify it, this string is the output of your convert_xml_to_hash function. Upon return from your function, you eval it, which gives you (hopefully) a hash reference again. Then you use Dumper again to print it.

Have you tried to just use the output of the toHash function directly? With so much back and forth between hash and string, it is no wonder that Perl loses a few characters...