I have the following arrays with different lengths

Actually, you have one array and a hash. This means you can do a simple lookup for each element of the array (i.e. $data{$element} ).

The following snippet would, for example, produce the output you want:

# ... data declarations as you have it (but with values "BCE" etc. quo
+ted)

print "|   |", (map sprintf(" %8s |", $_),            @headers), "\n";
+  # print column headers
print "| 1 |", (map sprintf(" %8s |", $data{$_}||""), @headers), "\n";
+  # print row of data

__END__
|   |  2011-34 |  2011-35 |  2011-36 |  2011-37 |  2011-38 |  2011-39 
+|  2011-40 |  2011-41 |
| 1 |      BCE |      YZA |      MID |      KAL |          |      WUL 
+|          |      YOK |
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P.S. please put <c> ... </c> around code sections of your post. This makes it easier to read.