Issue with Expat parser

We have been using Scott Klement's port of the Expat on the i for many
years. But running into an issue with a new customer.

They are sending XML files without the encoding declaration. No big deal,
they still parse. But they also include some foreign characters, and those
do not translate well. If I put the encoding of ISO-8859-1 in the file and
then parse it, those characters do translate correctly.

So I tried to specify the encoding on the call to XML_ParserCreate using
the constant XML_ENC_ISO8859_1. This did not translate correctly either,
but it did translate differently than using no encoding, so it did affect
it somehow.

The CCSID on the IFS files is 1252. I tried 819 also, but that did not
make a difference.

Anybody have any idea how I can get Expat to parse it as ISO-8859-1 without
the encoding specified in the file?

Thanks!
Rick