I have read that, but I am obviously missing the point somewhere. The point where it says "most functions of XML::LibXML that work with in-memory trees accept and return data as character strings (i.e. UTF-8 encoded with the UTF8 flag on)" made me think I would get the same encoded data out as I put in. This is repeated in the second of the basic rules and principles. I'm afraid I can't see anything indicating how to avoid the behaviour I see.

Regards,

John Davies

UTF-8 flag is a misnomer. Strings with this flag are Perl internal Unicode, not UTF-8. When creating/loading XML, use bytes. When supplying values to methods, use Unicode strings (e.g. $element->appendText( $unicode );).
map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

I don't think I'm getting confused by the flag as I'm not trying to read or write it. It's the text that talks about character strings that are UTF-8 encoded that may be confusing me, since the output is decoded. I thought I was creating the XML using bytes in the 6th line of my code, but if I'm getting that wrong, I would be interested. But that's not the real problem as I'm getting the same two bytes in my code and in the real files. The only method to which I believe I'm supplying values is the parser. I believe that I am putting encoded data in and getting decoded data back. That is the problem I am trying to solve - I can't see from the docs how to get encoded data back.

Regards,

John Davies

"UTF-8 encoded with the UTF8 flag on" means decoded strings (strings of Unicode Code Points), not strings encoded using UTF-8 (strings of bytes). This is the right thing to do.

As such, $node contains decode("UTF-8", chr(195) . chr(154)), which is chr(218) ("\N{U+00DA}").