Adjust which tempalte a page uses with a function?

Question

I know if I had a page that had a permalink such as /stories/ then I could create a page in my template called page-stores.php and it would load in place of the default page.php when that page loaded (see Template Hierarchy)

What I want to know is if I had that two page templates, maybe page.php and page2.php, if I could use the functions.php file to specify that if a page had a permalink of /stories/ it would use page2.php?

I know there is an option when editing a page to let the end user choose the page template, but in this case I would like to set it specifically.

Answer 1

This might work:

add_filter('page_template', 'custom_page_template');

function custom_page_template($template){
  // check your permalink here
  if(get_query_var('pagename') === 'stories')
    return locate_template(array('page2.php', 'page.php')); 

  return $template; 
}