Shell script - remove first and last quote (") from a variable

Question

Below is the snippet of a shell script from a larger script. It removes the quotes from the string that is held by a variable. I am doing it using sed, but is it efficient?

Answer 1

There is a straightforward way using xargs:

> echo '"quoted"' | xargs
quoted

xargs uses echo as the default command if no command is provided and strips quotes from the input. See e.g. here.