How can I strip first and last double quotes?

Question

I want to strip double quotes from:

string = \'\"\" \" \" \"\"\\\\1\" \" \"\" \"\"\'

to obtain:

string = \'\" \" \" \"\"\\\         


        

Answer 1

If you can't assume that all the strings you process have double quotes you can use something like this:

if string.startswith('"') and string.endswith('"'):
    string = string[1:-1]

Edit:

I'm sure that you just used string as the variable name for exemplification here and in your real code it has a useful name, but I feel obliged to warn you that there is a module named string in the standard libraries. It's not loaded automatically, but if you ever use import string make sure your variable doesn't eclipse it.