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I have a list with n occurrences of a certain element. I have a second list with

 Length[lis2] = n

I would like to replace the nth occurrence of the certain element in lis1 with the nth member of lis2.

lis1 = {A,b,c,d,A,e,f,g} Here, A is the special character.
lis2 = {X,Y}

res = {X,b,c,d,Y,e,f,g}

It seems that there should be an easy way of placing the nth member of lis2 at the right place in lis1 using

Position[lis1,A]

Thanks for any ideas!

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    $\begingroup$ ReplacePart[lis1, Thread[Flatten[Position[lis1, A]][[;; UpTo@Length@lis2]] -> lis2]] will get you started. You'll want to harden this with error checking (enough elements to change, etc) if this is not some one-shot need. $\endgroup$ – ciao Sep 20 '19 at 6:07
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lis1 = {A, b, c, d, A, e, f, g}
lis2 = {X, Y};

pos = Flatten @ Position[lis1, A];
lis1[[pos]] = lis2[[;; UpTo @ Length @ pos]];
lis1

{X, b, c, d, Y, e, f, g}

You can also use ReplaceAll as follows:

lis1 = {A, b, c, d, A, e, f, g};

l = RotateLeft[lis2];
lis1 /. A :> First[l = RotateRight[l]]

{X, b, c, d, Y, e, f, g}

l = RotateLeft[lis2];
lis1 /. e :> First[l = RotateRight[l]]

{A, b, c, d, A, X, f, g}

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This one does seem to do the trick:

ReplacePart[lis1, Position[lis1, A][[All, 1]] -> lis2]

I assume that all your inputs have proper length and structure. If thats not guaranteed you might want to incorporate some input checks or use different method altogether.

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