>  Yes, you're exploiting a bug. The correct way is to use
>  utf8::downgrade($var). Of course that's not available in Perl 5.6, it's only
>  in 5.7+.

Hmmm well I figured that this was pretty fishy behavior. I have come 
across an additional solution to the problem using something called 
Unicode::String. Using its conversion features appears to strip the utf8 
string off. Does anyone see any issues with this approach?

Cheers,

Terrence

Example

#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::Simple;
use Devel::Peek;
use Unicode::String qw(utf8 latin1 utf16);

my $config = XMLin("./config.xml");

my $protocol = "$config-> {ssh}->{protocol}";
my $u = utf8($protocol);
my $uconv = $u-> latin1;

print "Protocol = $protocol\n";
Dump $protocol;
print "\n";
print "U = $u\n";
Dump $u;
print "\n";
print "UCONV = $uconv\n";
Dump $uconv;


Sample Output

Protocol = 2
SV = PV(0x8274094) at 0x810447c
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x80fe328 "2"\0
  CUR = 1
  LEN = 2

U = 2
SV = RV(0x8107ce8) at 0x81043c8
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,ROK,OVERLOAD)
  RV = 0x827e240
  SV = PVMG(0x81a81c0) at 0x827e240
    REFCNT = 1
    FLAGS = (OBJECT,POK,pPOK)
    IV = 0
    NV = 0
    PV = 0x82825d8 "\0002"\0
    CUR = 2
    LEN = 3
    STASH = 0x815aef4   "Unicode::String"

UCONV = 2
SV = PV(0x8274100) at 0x81a598c
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK)
  PV = 0x80fe3a8 "2"\0
  CUR = 1
  LEN = 3


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