title: Adding variable whitespace between two strings
body: <p>I am not using a coding language. This has to be straight regex. </p>
  
  <p>I need to add a variable length of whitespace between two strings. The string I am passing to the regex has the number of whitespaces in the string itself and will need to be replaced:</p>
  
  <pre><code>string1 *27* string2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>so I need to insert 27 whitespaces into this string between string1 and string 2</p>
  
  <pre><code>\*(\d+)\*
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is my capture and it appear to be working, but I was trying to setup my replace with this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\s{$1}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>or this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$&amp;\s{$1}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So how would you do it? I am using expresso for my validation, but not all the regex patterns are supported by the text engine I am using.</p>