How do I properly populate a function by iterating over an alist?

Question

I've defined a function that is supposed to iterate over an alist, and use the CAR and CDR of each element in the list to populate the regexp in re-search-forward and the replacement string in replace-match, respectively. Here is what I have:

(defun search-and-replace ()
  (let ((alist '(("regexp" "replacement-str")
                 ...)))
    (dolist (search-pair alist)
      (point-min)
      (while (re-search-forward (car search-pair) nil t)
        (replace-match (cdr search-pair))))))

This returns an error: Wrong type argument: stringp, ("replacement-str"). What am I missing?

Edit:

Thanks for the help. Here's what I ended up with:

(defun search-and-replace (alist)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (dolist (search-pair alist)
      (while (re-search-forward (car search-pair) nil t)
        (replace-match (cdr search-pair)))
      (goto-char (point-min))))

Where each item in ALIST is a cons cell of ("regexp" . "replacement-string").

Answer 1

You want (cadr search-pair), not (cdr search-pair).

Either that or use an alist whose entries are dotted pairs, with the cdrs being your replacement strings.

The error message tells you that a string was expected and instead the list ("replacement-str") was passed.