Sounds like you're not encoding your text into bytes on output, so Perl has to guess what you want. It warns you about it with "Wide character in print" in one of the cases.

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(...)';
print $title;
[download]

or

use Encode qw( encode );
print encode('...', $title);
[download]

Update: The lack of character above 255 in the string posted by the OP means my explanation is not completely accurate. The solution is still pertinent, though.