It seems like the biggest hurdle is getting a list of countries. To overcome this, you could use Locale::Country to do: @country_names = all_country_names();

Then you could do something like put the countries in one hash and the words from the file in another hash and look for overlapping keys. use List::Compare:

$lc = List::Compare->new( \@country_names, \@words_in_file );
@countries_in_file = $lc->get_intersection;
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Edit: Now that I think about it a little more, it might be better to use your array of country names to grep through your file contents (after replacing new lines with spaces) to avoid issues with multi-word countries names.