Handling £ (pound sterling) symbols in content

I've hit a problem in XML::Twig trying to handle data exported from a 
legacy database, but I suspect this is an issue I need to get some 
advice on regardless of the parser...

The data contains '£' symbols which I'm struggling to format in XML for 
processing later on. The following code might help explain:

------------ BEGIN --------------

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::Twig;

my $t= XML::Twig->new();

# this is OK
#my $input = '<?xml 
version="1.0"?><root><item>one</item><item>two</item><item>three</item></root>'; 


# this is invalid
#my $input = '<?xml version="1.0"?><root><item>one 
£</item><item>two</item><item>three</item></root>';

# this is OK
#my $input = '<?xml 
version="1.0"?><root><item><![CDATA[one]]></item><item><![CDATA[two]]></item><item><![CDATA[three]]></item></root>'; 


# this is invalid
my $input = '<?xml version="1.0"?><root><item><![CDATA[one 
£]]></item><item><![CDATA[two]]></item><item><![CDATA[three]]></item></root>'; 


$t->parse($input);
$t->print;

------------ END --------------

Whether I wrap my text data in CDATA or not, as soon as I include a 
pound sterling symbol I get the following error:

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1, column 46, byte 46 at 
/usr/local/ActivePerl-5.8/lib/XML/Parser.pm line 187
  at /Users/nkh/Documents/Dev/Perl/xml_twig/pound_test1.pl line 14

Byte 46 seems to align with the '£', so I'm wondering what I need to do 
to get this character not to break the parser.

-- 
Neil Hughes
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