Replace text between two special characters

Question

I have a character vector as:

x<- \"\\t\\t\"

and

 y<- \"TOT_A01\"

Answer 1

I would use something like

gsub("\".*\"", paste0("\"", y, "\""), x)

It just means "find text within two quotation marks in x and replace it with y inside two quotation marks"

I think this is what you want, your example is wrong though

Answer 2

Try

 sub('(?<=").*(?=")', y, x, perl=TRUE)
 #[1] "\t\t<taxon id=\"TOT_A01\"/>"