No, there is no way to do that and even if there was it would be a very bad idea.

See the Perl XML FAQ for help on converting from UTF-8 to a legacy encoding on output.

You're asking the wrong question. The right question to ask is why the original data you're trying to read isn't in Unicode already. And once you've fixed that by parsing the document why do you want to unfix it and convert it back to a legacy encoding? Is there some application that you're feeding the data to that doesn't understand Unicode?

ASCII, Latin-1, CP1252 and all the other legacy encodings each cater for a tiny subset of the characters supported by Unicode. This means that you can't combine data from source documents in different encodings, because a character that you read from one document might not be available in the encoding used by the other document. Whereas if you simply used Unicode you wouldn't need to worry.

Perl can quite happily deal with binary strings of bytes. If putting CP1252 data into binary strings makes your job easier then fine do that - I'm certainly not suggesting that would be 'wrong'. But XML is not a binary format. XML is for strings of character data. Perl's native format for character data is UTF-8. If you want to use Perl's character functions like lc, uc, length, substr, tr, regular expressions etc then your data needs to be in UTF-8. ASCII data is a subset of UTF-8 so characters in the 0x00-0x7F range already are UTF-8. But for characters from 0x80 and beyond your data must be UTF-8 for Perl's character functions to understand them. Other languages use different native encodings - Java for instance uses UTF-16.

Remember that an XML document which uses the CP1252 encoding can also contain characters which are not CP1252. For example if the document contained the numeric character entity Ā (a capital A with a macron: Ā) then the Perl string returned from XML::Simple will contain that character. Similarly if the document used a DTD which defined named character entities (such as α) then those will also be translated into the appropriate characters.

You ask why XML::Simple doesn't support legacy encodings and yet it demonstrably does. When you read an XML file in a legacy encoding the parser module used by XML::Simple transparently converts the data from the specified legacy encoding into Perl's native character encoding. Note this is a function of all the parser modules (eg: SAX, XML::Parser, LibXML etc) and not actually a function of XML::Simple which is just a convenience layer over the parser modules. XML::Simple doesn't transparently support converting to another encoding when generating XML because I have never needed that functionality. You could probably implement it for the CP1252 case by overriding XML::Simple's escape_value method.

Finally, you make the silly assertion that as the author of XML::Simple I am demanding you rewrite your legacy code to use unicode in order to use XML::Simple. I am not demanding anything. I am providing a tool which you may or may not find useful. If it is not useful to you then of course you should use a different tool.