Replace pattern with line from file using awk/sed [duplicate]

Here is a possible answer. I used perl though. It does not check for blank lines in the second file. And the substitution is hard coded.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use strict;

# subroutine to load a test file into an array
sub load{
   my $file = shift;
   open my $in, "<", $file or die "unable to open $file : $!";
   my @data = <$in>;
   chomp @data;
   foreach (@data) { s/\cM//g;}
   return @data;
}


my $first = shift || die "usage: $0 [first] [second]\n";
my @first_data = &load($first);
my $second = shift || die "usage: $0 [first] [second]\n";
my @second_data = &load($second);

my $i = 0;
foreach( @first_data )
{
    if( s{(<td class="headerValue">)(.*?)(</td>)}{$1$second_data[$i]$3} )
    {
        $i++;
    }
    print "$_\n";
}