American National Standards Institute?

From Windows-1252 (emphasis mine):

This article is about the character encoding commonly mislabeled as "ANSI". For the actual ANSI character encoding, see ASCII. For the actual "ANSI extended Latin" encoding, see ANSEL.

For every Windows API function that deals with a string, there's an (A)NSI and a (W)ide version of it.

The ANSI version uses the ANSI/Active Code Page as the encoding, while the wide version uses UTF-16le.

Perl builtins use the (A)NSI version of API functions, so interactions with the system via Perl builtins are limited to the character set of the ACP.

For Windows for the American market, the system's ACP is 1252.

Perl builtins use the (A)NSI version of API functions

Thank you! This is some how inspiring. Now I can do this :

use Win32;
use Storable;
my $file = Win32::GetShortPathName('X:\Some\Unicode\Path\\'); # it giv
+es me a 8.3 path
print -e $file; # Got it!
store {}, "$file/Storable.sto"; # Done!
[download]

The only draw back for now is the path/file must existing, so that the FS can "assign" the 8.3 location.