As you mentioned that you just want to somehow process the incoming html and then pass it forward for other processing, it might be that something like the code below could help.

That is, using UTF-8 for what goes out to STDOUT and re-encode the title that was decoded by get_text:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::Entities;
use HTML::TokeParser;

binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

local $/;
my $lines = <DATA>;

my $tok_par = HTML::TokeParser->new( \$lines );
my $tok_inf = $tok_par->get_token ;
my $tok_typ = shift @{$tok_inf};
print "Type: $tok_typ \n" ;
my $title =  $tok_par->get_text() || "<NO TITLE FOUND>";
print "Title: $title \n" ;

my $encoded_title = encode_entities( $title, '\x{ff}-\x{ffff}' );
print "Enc_Title: $encoded_title\n";

__END__
<title>egrave: &egrave; : eacute: &eacute; : rsquo: &rsquo; : lsquo: &
+lsquo;</title>
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