macos - How to enter a tab char on command line?

Question

In an interactive bash terminal how do I enter a tab character? For example, if I wanted to use sed to replace "_" with tabs I'd like to use:

echo $string | sed 's/[_]/TAB/g'

Where TAB means the tab key. This works in a shell script not interactively where when I hit the tab key I get no character and a clank noise sounds. I've also tried but it only places t's in the string and not tabs.

Note this is mac osx.

Answer 1

Precede it with Control + V, followed by Tab to suppress the usual expansion behavior.