Another way of looking at this is (to borrow from educated_foo's answer: ($url = $1) if (m{<strong.*?(http://.*?)&});

I tried with the following code:

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( stack_depth => 1, agent =>"Mozilla/5.0
+ (X11; U; Linux i68+6; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040918 Firefox/0.9.3 ")
+;
my $pic = "C:\/LV3.JPG";
$mech->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies->new(stack_depth => 1) );
$mech->get("http://tinypic.com");
if($mech->content() =~ /UPLOAD NOW/ ){
    print "TinyPic loaded... ";
    $mech->form_name("upload_form");
    $mech->field('the_file' => $pic);
    $mech->submit();
    m{
     <strong                    # match "<strong"
     .*?                        # skip to the next
     (                          # (start capturing)
         http://                # "http://"
         .*?                    # skip to the next
     )                          # (stop capturing)
&                               # ampersand
}x
    print $1;
}
[download]

and it returned a syntax error. I also tried with the other version you gave me here:

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( stack_depth => 1, agent =>"Mozilla/5.0
+ (X11; U; Linux i68+6; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040918 Firefox/0.9.3 ")
+;
my $pic = "C:\/LV3.JPG";
$mech->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies->new(stack_depth => 1) );
$mech->get("http://tinypic.com");
if($mech->content() =~ /UPLOAD NOW/ ){
    print "TinyPic loaded... ";
    $mech->form_name("upload_form");
    $mech->field('the_file' => $pic);
    $mech->submit();
    m{<strong.*?(http://.*?)&};
    print $1;
}
[download]

This version didn't get a syntax error but also didn't output anything