Removing in-field quotes in csv file

Question

Let\'s say we have a comma separated file (csv) like this:

\"name of movie\",\"starring\",\"director\",\"release year\"
\"dark knight rises\",\"christian bale,          


        

Answer 1

With awk you can do something like:

awk -v Q='"' '{ gsub("[\"']","") ; gsub(",",Q "," Q) ; print Q $0 Q }'

Answer 2

How about

import csv

def remove_quotes(s):
    return ''.join(c for c in s if c not in ('"', "'"))

with open("fixquote.csv","rb") as infile, open("fixed.csv","wb") as outfile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile)
    writer = csv.writer(outfile, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
    for line in reader:
        writer.writerow([remove_quotes(elem) for elem in line])

which produces

~/coding$ cat fixed.csv 
"name of movie","starring","director","release year"
"dark knight rises","christian bale, anna hathaway","christopher nolan","2012"
"the dark knight","christian bale, heath ledger","christopher nolan","2008"
"The day when earth stood still","Michael Rennie,the strong man","robert wise","1951"
"the gladiator","russel the awesome crowe","ridley scott","2000"

BTW, you might want to check the spelling of some of those names..

Answer 3

Split the values into an array. Iterate through the array removing any quotes, other than the first and last character. Hope it helps.