Desperately Seeking Regular Expression

Hi all -

I am porting a PROGRESS database to PostgreSQL.

I've had success previously doing a port - but from FoxPro which
allows one to dump data delimited by tabs.  Unfortunately, PROGRESS
dumps fields delimited by whitespace rather than tabs and I can find no
documentation on how to alter this behaviour.

I read the recent post wherein someone used awk to change whitespace
to tabs:

cat $input | awk '{ print $1"\t"$2"\t"$3"\t"$4"\t"$5"\t" \
$6"\t"$7"\t" }' > $input.out

I am using this with good effect.  However, I run into trouble as
inside my dump file(s) there are doublequoted character strings.
awk is changing the whitespace delimited words inside the char strs
into tab delimited words inside strings.  Ouch.

What follows is my inept effort to get sed on my side as I try to sort
this out:
sed -e 's/"    *"/ /g' $input.out > $input.sql

This is a miserable failure as it simply converts all the tabs back
to whitespace.  I've tried escaping the double quotes in the regex
but then sed changes nothing.

Can someone put me out of my misery?  Anyone have suggestions on a
regular expression that will:

Convert tabs to whitespace *inside* of double quoted strings *only* ???
I don't care if the regex is for sed/awk/perl, whatever, I need to get
the job done!

TIA!

Stuck in Staten Island,
Tom
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