For yet another alternative that allows you to include regular expressions in the patterns to be found:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $filename = 'file.txt';
open(FH, '<', $filename) or die "$filename: $!";
my $text = do { local $/; <FH> };
close(FH);

my @patterns = qw(january february egypt a.*e <sample>(.*?)</sample> e
+tc);

print map {
    $text =~ /$_/ ? "$_: found\n" : "$_: not found\n"
} @patterns;

__END__
january: found
february: found
egypt: found
a.*e: not found
<sample>(.*?)</sample>: not found
etc: not found
[download]

Depending on how you want your patterns interpreted you might want to add the s or m modifiers to the pattern match, to change the behavior of '^', '$' and '.'. See perlre for details.