Although it seems like the right thing to do, use utf8 simply informs Perl that you will be using UTF-8 encoded text within your script itself, not necessarily in the data files being read from or written to. Although it references XML::DOM, this thread should help you with the right voodoo for binmode and encoding: error parsing utf8 chars using XML DOM parser

Update: You might also want to check out Unicode-processing issues in Perl and how to cope with it