R-lang: remove first character if equal to quotation mark

Question

R newbie. I am trying to remove the, \" from the beginning and end of a line in a dataframe. I do not want to remove if the quotation is not the first or last character. I\'

Answer 1

you can trim a quotation mark from the end of the string like this:

x <- gsub('"$','',x)

and from the beginning of the string like this:

x <- gsub('^"','',x)

since the characters $ and ^ match the end and beginning of the string. For example:

myData<-data.frame(foo=c('"asdf"','ASDF'),
                   bar=c('jkl;','"JKL;"'))
myData
#>     foo    bar
#>1 "asdf"   jkl;
#>2   ASDF "JKL;"

# trim the quote characters from myData$foo
myData$foo <- gsub("^\"|\"$", "", myData$foo)
myData

#>   foo    bar
#>1 asdf   jkl;
#>2 ASDF "JKL;"