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

I know this is a very old question, but here is another sed variation, which may be useful to someone. Unlike some of the others, it only replaces double quotes at the start or end...

echo "$opt" | sed -r 's/^"|"$//g'