1. I recommend asking your question on PerlMonks.

2. You don't mention what went wrong. When you post on PerlMonks, include some code; the error message if there was one; and describe the result you expected.

3. Any data returned by XML::Simple will be encoded in UTF-8 regardless of what encoding the XML document was in. This is a feature.

4. If your XML does not use ASCII or UTF-8 encoding then you *MUST* declare an encoding in the xml declaration.