Use the $tree->content_list method and concatenate all the non-element nodes, so get just the text for this element. The full list of methods can be seen in the documentation for HTML::Element. 
$text = join '', grep { not ref $_ } $tree->content_list;

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integral, resident of freenode's #perl

In reply to Re: HTML::TreeBuilder by integral
in thread HTML::TreeBuilder by Doug Bales

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