Issue with Perl Scripts / XML

I'm fairly new at Perl / XML and i got assign the task to migrate from one server to another some of the perl functionality that we use in our application, i was able to migrate part of it (create and excel file) but i can't get the part to actually parse an excel file done...
I keep getting this error no matter what modules i installed in my perl/site/lib folder..

Software error:
not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1, column 3, byte 3 at C:/Strawberry/perl/site/lib/XML/Parser.pm line 187.
at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin\carestreamhealth\importParts_test2test.pl line 255.

I'm at a lost on why this is not working, we have a current instance with the same scripts but running different perl (Active State) and it does work.. Problem with that is that we need to migrate to a windows server 2019 and we are not allow to install active state, we need to use strawberry perl 5.32.1

any help will be appreciate it

The issue wasn't a malformed XML per say, the issue was that the server wasn't able to reach out to the site where the request was coming from (we added the ip to the server whitelist) and everything is working as expected. Thanks everyone for your comments. !