G'day jsteng,

If you create all tags once and they're stable, you could create a hash and then use exists:

my %tag_for = map { $_ => 1 } $text->tagNames;
... later ...
if (exists $tag_for{$j}) { ... }
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If your tags are in constant flux (i.e. being added and removed) you could use grep to check for existence:

if (grep $_ eq $j, $text->tagNames) { ... }
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If you used last in your foreach loop for efficiency reasons, take a look at List::Util::first. You might want to Benchmark though: first only allows the "function BLOCK LIST" format:

first { $_ eq $j } $text->tagNames
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grep allows that format as well as the "function EXPR, LIST" format (which I've shown above). The BLOCK style is typically slower than the EXPR style (certainly for grep, map, and maybe others).

By the way, I'm not aware of any built-in method like:

$text->does_tag_exist($tag_name)
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but perhaps someone else does.