chickadee » regex » string-substitute

Searches substrings in STRING that match REGEXP and substitutes them with the string SUBST. The substitution can contain references to subexpressions in REGEXP with the \NUM notation, where NUM refers to the NUMth parenthesized expression. The optional argument MODE defaults to 1 and specifies the number of the match to be substituted. Any non-numeric index specifies that all matches are to be substituted.

(string-substitute "([0-9]+) (eggs|chicks)" "\\2 (\\1)" "99 eggs or 99 chicks" 2)
=> "99 eggs or chicks (99)"

Note that a regular expression that matches an empty string will signal an error.