String manipulation with partial matching of elements

Question

I have a string list constructed as follows:

lis = {"Abcdef","Ghij Kl"," GHI 01", " ABC 02"}

and would like to rearrange this to give:

res = {"Abcdef","02","Ghij Kl","01"}

This involves replacing the all-caps portion of the last two elements with the matching string that begins with the same characters, then splitting the revised third and fourth element to give res. [The white spaces in lis are intentional.]

Thanks for any thoughts!

Answer 1

lis = {"Abcdef", "Ghij Kl", " GHI 01", " ABC 02"}

StringReplace[
 SortBy[lis, StringTake[StringTrim[#], 3] &]
 , " " ~~ (WordCharacter ..) ~~ " " ~~ k : (DigitCharacter ..) :> k]

{"Abcdef", "02", "Ghij Kl", "01"}