How can I strip first and last double quotes?

Question

I want to strip double quotes from:

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

to obtain:

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


        

Answer 1

Almost done. Quoting from http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=strip#str.strip

The chars argument is a string specifying the set of characters to be removed.

[...]

The chars argument is not a prefix or suffix; rather, all combinations of its values are stripped:

So the argument is not a regexp.

>>> string = '"" " " ""\\1" " "" ""'
>>> string.strip('"')
' " " ""\\1" " "" '
>>> 

Note, that this is not exactly what you requested, because it eats multiple quotes from both end of the string!