From the documentation on WWW:Mechanize:
"Returns a text-only version of the page, with all HTML markup stripped. This feature requires HTML::TreeBuilder to be installed, or a fatal error will be thrown."
My guess is that "all HTML markup stripped" is the cause of your discrepancy

In reply to Re: Counting chars in a HTML-page by Illuminatus
in thread Counting chars in a HTML-page by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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