Start by reading the IP list into a hash.

If he can trust the "format" of his lines enough, then along with others who partecipated to this thread I would suggest going with split - and I hardly see a risk of "messing up things" if he can not.

Also, we recommend all the time not to slurp a whole file in at a time if not for a good reason, but perhaps in this case there's no reason not to:

my %text_for = map { chomp; split /\s*\|\s*/, $_, 2 } <$iplist>;
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Note that this assumes each IP has only one entry in your list. If that's not the case, there's another solution for that...

Of course in that case one couldn't go with the simple map solution. I would do:

while (<$iplist>) {
    chomp;
    my ($k,$v) = split /\s*\|\s*/, $_, 2;
    push @{ $text_for{$k} }, $v;
}
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