On another suggestion in this thread, I'll have Data::Dumper print them out with $Data::Dumper::Useqq=1. I'm highly confident there is no extra whitespace, but we'll find out in a moment.

The variables come from a static page url, e.g. http://domain/path. $q is path, unescaped. And $page_title comes from a database of paths.

As you can see from that code, in that latest example, they both had values of 'Polygram compilation albums'. I also did an eq comparison, which came out to 1. I suppose the whitespace wasn't clear in my printout because the tabs didn't copy exactly.

Edit: here was the printout from the first failure after making that change:

warn qq(\nDILBERT 1a: "), Dumper($q_meta), " ", Dumper($page_title) if
+ $is_dilbert;

DILBERT 1a: "$VAR1 = "Haji\\ Ayub\\ Afridi";
 $VAR1 = "Haji Ayub Afridi";"
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