The links in WWW::Mechanize are WWW::Mechanize::Link objects. So you have to use their methods to get more than their auto-stringification.

use strict;

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$mech->get('http://amazon.com/');
$mech->success or die $mech->status();

my $link_obj = $mech->find_link
    (text_regex => qr/computer/i );

printf( "%s\n\t%s\n\n",
        $link_obj->text(),
        $link_obj->url(),
        );
[download]

Thanks guys. I ended up with:

my $topic_obj = $mech->find_link
(text_regex => qr/[LINK TEXT]/i );
$PrevMsg = $topic_obj->url;
$PrevMsg =~ s/[SORTED DATA]//g;
[download]

and it works wonderfully.

The docs for WWW::Mechanize state that the find_link() method

returns a reference to a two element array which has the link URL and link text, respectively. If it fails to find a link it returns undef.

You can do something like this:

my $result = $a->find_link( text => "download" );

if( defined $result )
{
    my ( $url, $linktext ) = @{ $result };
    # use $linktext here
}
[download]

HTH

Update: This is true for WWW::Mechanize 0.48, the latest version that I found using PPM. The most recent version on CPAN (1.16) uses WWW::Mechanize::Link objects, as Your Mother indicated below.

Check out WWW::Mechanize::Examples.