Replacing the nth word of a string

Hi All,

I am trying to replace the nth word of a string and i am struggling to find an efficient way of doing it.

Below are a couple of ugly inefficient soloutions.

Code:

clear
set obs 1
local mytext = "to be or not to be, that is the question"
gen text = "`mytext'"

local wordN = wordcount("`mytext'")
gen newword= ""
forvalues  i = 1/`wordN' {
    if `i'==7 {
         replace newword= newword + " "+"it"
    }
    else {
       replace newword= newword + " "+ word(text, `i')
    }
 }
 list

or

Code:

clear
set obs 1
local mytext = "to be or not to be, that is the question"
gen text = "`mytext'"

split text, gen(word)
replace word7 = "it"
egen newword = concat(word*), punct(" ")
list

I was imagining there was a function called subword(text,re) or something more direct and more efficient.

Thanks

Adrian