How can I strip first and last double quotes?

I want to strip double quotes from:

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

to obtain:

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

I tried to use rstrip, lstrip and strip('[^\"]|[\"$]') but it did not work.

How can I do this?

If the quotes you want to strip are always going to be "first and last" as you said, then you could simply use:

string = string[1:-1]

If you can't assume that all the strings you process have double quotes you can use something like this:

if string.startswith('"') and string.endswith('"'):
    string = string[1:-1]

Edit:

I'm sure that you just used string as the variable name for exemplification here and in your real code it has a useful name, but I feel obliged to warn you that there is a module named string in the standard libraries. It's not loaded automatically, but if you ever use import string make sure your variable doesn't eclipse it.

IMPORTANT: I'm extending the question/answer to strip either single or double quotes. And I interpret the question to mean that BOTH quotes must be present, and matching, to perform the strip. Otherwise, the string is returned unchanged.

To "dequote" a string representation, that might have either single or double quotes around it (this is an extension of @tgray's answer):

def dequote(s):
    """
    If a string has single or double quotes around it, remove them.
    Make sure the pair of quotes match.
    If a matching pair of quotes is not found, return the string unchanged.
    """
    if (s[0] == s[-1]) and s.startswith(("'", '"')):
        return s[1:-1]
    return s

Explanation:

startswith can take a tuple, to match any of several alternatives. The reason for the DOUBLED parentheses (( and )) is so that we pass ONE parameter ("'", '"') to startswith(), to specify the permitted prefixes, rather than TWO parameters "'" and '"', which would be interpreted as a prefix and an (invalid) start position.

s[-1] is the last character in the string.

Testing:

print( dequote("\"he\"l'lo\"") )
print( dequote("'he\"l'lo'") )
print( dequote("he\"l'lo") )
print( dequote("'he\"l'lo\"") )

=>

he"l'lo
he"l'lo
he"l'lo
'he"l'lo"

(For me, regex expressions are non-obvious to read, so I didn't try to extend @Alex's answer.)