Assuming that $ele is an HTML::Element object containing your <td> element, then:

if (grep {!ref($_) or $_->tag ne "a"} $td->content_list) {
  # The element has non-link text
} else {
  # The element only has <a></a> elements in it
}
[download]

See the HTML::Element documentation for more information. There may be a more efficient method than the above, but you havn't specified your problem well enough for me to see it.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'