If you're using Perl 5.8.something, you probably want to look up Encode, which lets you do things like:

use Encode;

# ...  $buff holds a utf8 string:

my $cp1250buff = encode( 'cp1250', $buff );
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But as grantm points out in his reply, a cp1250-encoded string is only useful as something to write as output to a file that needs to be written with this particular encoding. And in that case, you don't even need the Encode module -- just use binmode on the output file handle, as explained in the PerlIO man page:

open( OUTPUT, ">output.txt" ) or die $!;
binmode OUTPUT, ":encoding(cp1250)";

#  ... or just use the 3-arg version of open:
# open( OUTPUT, ">:encoding(cp1250)", "output.txt" )
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