Parsing a long XML document with the XML::Simple API took an unacceptably long time if the XML::SAX parser implementation was available. The XML::SAX parser implementation was not optimized for large string variables (e.g. 2 MB). The XML::SAX parser has been updated to handle the reading of large strings in a more efficient way. This update enables long XML documents to be parsed in a more reasonable time.

XML documents which have a whitespace character as the first character were not handled correctly. A warning, "Unable to recognize encoding of this document", was printed. With this update, encoding detection code has been changed to recognize XML documents with leading whitespace as a document without an XML declaration and with a default encoding. The warning is no longer printed as such documents are valid documents with encoding detection rules conforming to documents without an XML declaration.