How to remove quotes surrounding the first two columns in Vim?

Question

Say I have the following style of lines in a text file:

\"12\" \"34\" \"some text     \"
\"56\" \"78\" \"some more text\"
.
.
.
etc.

I want

Answer 1

Say if you want to delete all columns but the first one, the simple and easy way is to input this in Vim:

:%!awk '{print $1}'

Or you want all columns but the first one, you can also do this:

:%!awk '{$1="";$0=$0;$1=$1;print}'

Indeed it requires external tool to accomplish the quest, but awk is installed in Linux and Mac by default, and I think folks with no UNIX-like system experience rarely use Vim in Windows, otherwise you probably known how to get a Windows version of awk.