Yes, Perl is one of many languages that can help you with Text Mining and Information Retrieval. It certainly helped with my thesis, but like all tools, it can take some time to learn to use them. What you haven't clearly said is whether you only want to do a bit of parsing/extracting or go full on into Natural Language Processing which is why you were asked for a small sample to give us an idea what you're after. As mentioned above, your baby steps will likely involve regular expressions which is actually a small language all on it's own, but IMHO, Perl has the best regex implementation. You can find a short introduction in Modern Perl. I liked it so much, I bought a paper copy.

There are a lot of third party libraries available from CPAN that go beyond what's easily achievable with the basic language. Investigate the Lingua::EN modules for some ideas and try not to re-invent the wheel without a good reason. Best of luck,