What you're retrieving is the string with the value 'wxTE_MULTILINE', which also happens to the same as the name of the constant wxTE_MULTILINE, whose value we don't know.

In order to set a scalar to the right value to use in place of the constant, you need to map from the string through to the value of the constant. Something along the lines of:

sub map_constant_name {
  my ($name) = @_ ;

  # Let's not eval anything other than a simple name !

  if ($name !~ /^\w+$/) {
    $@ = "will not map '$name'" ;
    return undef ;
  } ;

  # OK -- eval to try to get constant value

  my $val = eval "$name()" ;

  return $@ ? undef : $val ;
} ;
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will do the trick, but is still pretty dangerous -- allowing the contents of the XML to run any subroutine visible at this point.

Safer would be to construct a hash mapping allowed names to their values:

my %constant_map = map { ($_, map_constant_name($_)) } qw(....) ;
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