sed replace two double quotes and keep text

Question

Text to be processed :

""text""
"text"
""

output desired :

"text"
"text"
""

Tried with :

 echo -e '""text""\n"text"\n""' | sed -e 's/"".*""/".*"/g'

But obviously no luck.

Cheers,

Answer 1

Another approach

cat file | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g'

Details

sed 's/"//g' remove all double quote

sed 's/^/"/g' put a double quote at the beginning of each line

sed 's/$/"/g' put a double quote at the end of each line

Note

This approach will work only if there is one word per line, like in your example.

Answer 2

Based on your sample input, you could just use this:

sed '/^""$/! s/""/"/g' file

On lines which don't only contain two double quotes, globally replace all pairs of double quotes with one double quote.

Answer 3

$ sed 's/"\("[^"]*"\)"/\1/' file
"text"
"text"
""

Answer 4

Could you please try following awk command and let me know if this helps you.

awk -v s1="\"" '!/^\"\"$/{gsub(/\"\"/,s1)} 1'  Input_file

Answer 5

Answer by Aaron is also fine but back-referencing is costlier in general. Why not use a simpler command:

echo -e '""text""\n"text"\n""' | sed 's/""*/"/g'

Regex to replace more than one double quote to single one.

Answer 6

echo -e '""text""\n"text"\n""' |awk '/""text""/{gsub(/""/,"\42")}1'

"text"
"text"
""