Yeah, that can happen.

Win32 supports single-byte-character API calls ("A") or UTF-16 API calls (called "UNICODE" or "W"). When using "A" calls, you can only represent characters in your defined "code page" (which then get converted to UTF-16 which is what is used by the underlying OS code).

So either change your code page or use the "W" APIs. You'll have to do some searching to figure out what is the current state of getting access to the "W" APIs from Perl. I've seen several paths for doing such with different trade-offs but it has been so long since I've looked at that so I won't throw out my faded memory of out-dated info.