As since 4.1 mysqldump is charset-aware it should put an encoding in xml dumps (in --xml mode). First line should look like <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> or <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> for --default-character-set=latin1 the tricky part is where to take "standard" charset names from. May be from SHOW CHARACTER SET ? (then we should make sure that the first word in Description column is always the correct IANA charset name as in www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets)
