Greetings, Merry Monks of the Monastery - I'm stumped on trying to figure out a regex for this, and it's a bit of surprise to me; I've been merrily regexing for years, but I've come a sudden cropper here. I'd appreciate some help. I need to replace all tabs in a line that are not a) next to a double-quote, b) at the beginning of the line, or c) at the end of the line. Now, I could say something nasty like 
s/(?:^\t|\t$)/-=-|1|-=-/g;
s/([^"])(?:\t")/$1-=-|2|-=-/g;
s/(?:"\t)([^"])/-=-|3|-=-$1/g;
s/"\t"/-=-|4|-=-/g;
s/\t//g;
#...and then the obvious Opposite Thing

[download]
but... my Perlish soul yearns for something more - you know, prettier. Isn't there some magic look-around regex that could do it all in one pass? I've been fiddling and fiddling with it, well past the point of practicality, and now I just want to know if it's doable.

In reply to Regex for replacing a character "not next to" another character by flightdm

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