[okfn-labs] Find country names in blobs of unknown text

Fri Jun 13 15:54:28 UTC 2014

I'm looking for a function or regular expression that finds country names in blobs of text.
This can just be something that does a bunch of exact string matches so that it doesn't matter
whether the source blob (company names in my case) is spelled "Aecom New Zealand Limited",
"Aecom (New Zealand)", "Aecom, New Zealand", or "New Zealand". Has someone released something
like this?

If I don't see an answer soon, I'm going to write a regular expression that matches with a
bunch of country names from some country name dataset.