Extract text from quotation marks in PHP

Question

I have a PHP page which gets text from an outside source wrapped in quotation marks. How do I strip them off?
For example:

input: "This is a text"
output: This is a text

Please answer with full PHP coding rather than just the regex...

Answer 1

This will work quite nicely unless you have strings with multiple quotes like """hello""" as input and you want to preserve all but the outermost "'s:

$output = trim($input, '"');

trim strips all of certain characters from the beginning and end of a string in the charlist that is passed in as a second argument (in this case just "). If you don't pass in a second argument it trims whitespace.

If the situation of multiple leading and ending quotes is an issue you can use:

$output = preg_replace('/^"|"$/', '', $input);

Which replaces only one leading or trailing quote with the empty string, such that:

""This is a text"" becomes "This is a text"

Answer 2

$output = str_replace('"', '', $input);

Of course, this will remove all quotation marks, even from inside the strings. Is this what you want? How many strings like this are there?

Answer 3

The question was on how to do it with a regex (maybe for curiosity/learning purposes).

This is how you would do that in php:

$result = preg_replace('/(")(.*?)(")/i', '$2', $subject);

Hope this helps, Buckley