Here's a regex solution. Single-quotes are used in place of double-quotes to avoid Windoze command-line escape-ology, but this approach will work with double-quotes just as well. Note: All quotes must be paired. Quoted sub-strings can contain escaped quotes. 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $string =
   qq{uuu\tvvv\t'www\t\t'\txxx\t'\t\tyyy'\tzzz\n};
 print qq{$string};
 ;;
 $string =~
   s{ ( ' [^\\']* (?: \\. [^\\']*)* ' )        }
    { (my $notabs = $1) =~ tr{\t}{}d;  $notabs }xmsge;
 ;;
 print qq{$string};
"
uuu     vvv     'www            '       xxx     '               yyy'  
+  zzz

uuu     vvv     'www'   xxx     'yyy'   zzz

[download]

Update: This version ignores escaped double-quotes both inside and outside paired-quoted sub-strings: 

use warnings;
use strict;

# check with escaped double-quotes inside and outside
# double-quoted sub-strings.

my $string =
  qq{uuu\t\\"vvv\t"notab\t\t"\txxxx\t"\t\tno\\"tab"\tzzz\n};
print qq{$string};

$string =~
  s{ ((?<! \\) " [^\\"]* (?: \\. [^\\"]*)* ") }
   { (my $notabs = $1) =~ tr{\t}{}d;  $notabs }xmsge;

print qq{$string};

[download]

Output: 

uuu     \"vvv   "notab          "       xxxx    "               no\"ta
+b"        zzz
uuu     \"vvv   "notab" xxxx    "no\"tab"       zzz

[download]

In reply to Re: Remove tabs only between quotation marks by AnomalousMonk
in thread Remove tabs only between quotation marks by bestresearch2

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