Unfortunately, no, there is no real premade way to translate them into ASCII because those characters do not exist in ASCII. What to do depends on requrements of your database and what scheme you will use to convert the various characters.

If your db will support Unicode, the easiest thing to do would be to convert the encoding from cp1252 to utf-8.

use Encoding;

my $record = 'whatever';

from_to($record, 'cp1252', 'utf-8');
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If it will handle Latin-1, then all you need to do is handle the characters from \x80-\x9F than re-encode to 'iso-8859-1'. Other than \x80-\x9F, MS cp1252 and Latin-1 are identical.

If you really need ASCII, you are going to have to come up with your own transliteration scheme for which ASCII character is an acceptable replacement for the "upper" characters.

There is a list of cp1252 characters with their Unicode codepoints available at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/1252.htm