Using a proper hash greatly simplifies this task (as you have been told many times already). 
use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw(first);

my %data = (
     date => ['', '2009-01-01', '2009-01-02', ''],
     correct => ['Article_text1', 'Article_text2'],
);

my $correction = first { length($_) } @{$data{correct}};
my $date       = first { length($_) } @{$data{date}};

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Please read perldsc and perlreftut which both explain data structures in Perl very nicely.

(Update: change link from perlref to perlreftut, which is more introductory).

In reply to Re: Alternative values from array and print by moritz
in thread Alternative values from array and print by gem555

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