Is there a way to add code to each instance of a regex match on the fly?

Let's say I have a block of text and I want to replace each instance of the word "the" with an indexed number.

For example...

"The great white shark is the father of bite theory."

would become.开发者_StackOverflow社区..

"0 great white shark is 1 fa2r of bite 3ory."

I'm looking for something like: myText.match(/the/gi).each(function(i){ //? });

jquery solutions welcome.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/sYQgb/1/

var i = -1;
myText = myText.replace(/the/gi, function(){ return ++i; });

function replaceText(text, splitArg) {
    //var text ="axaxa";
    var parts = text.split(splitArg);

    var replaced = "";
    var part;
    for (var i=0;i<parts.length;i++) {
        part = parts[i]
        if(i > 0)
            replaced += i-1;

        replaced+=part;

    }
    return replaced;
}


function writeLine(text) {
     document.write("<p>"+text+" &nbsp;</p>");   
}

writeLine(replaceText("axa", "x"));
writeLine(replaceText("axaxa", "x"));
writeLine(replaceText("axaxxa", "x"));
writeLine(replaceText("axaxxa", /x+/));//**using a regex!**
writeLine(replaceText("", "x"));
writeLine(replaceText("aa", "x"));

//output:
//a0a  
//a0a1a  
//a0a12a  
//a0a1a  
// 
//aa  

In case you want to play around: http://jsfiddle.net/QFUWG/