remove the first and last character of a string

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

How can i remove the first and last character of strings like below:

"^^^613*"
"admt130"
"^^^613*"
"123456"
"adg8484"
"DQitYV09dh1C"

Means i wanna remove the quotes("").

Please help

2 
sed 's/"//g' file

Guru.

1 Like
3

Will remove only if " is at start or end.

sed 's/^\"//;s/\"$//' inputfile
4

It works...only if the two extreme characters are quotes...can there be a universal sed statement that will remove the first and last character of a string like:

"nhdjfdjf"
/sjdkfjf/
dkjdbdkj;
1kfkflflf//

etc

5 
sed 's/.\(.*\)./\1/' file

Guru.

6
7

This should fix it.

sed 's/^.\(.*\).$/\1/' inputfile
1 Like
8

as such, the sed should work fine on a normal file..looks like your awk command is giving some extra spaces at the end..try this to remove those extra spaces:

find /test/ -name "x*.cfg"|while read i; do grep "reg.1.random" $i|awk -F"=" '{print $2}'| sed 's/ *$//'|sed 's/.\(.*\)./\1/'; done

Guru.

9

[root@server1 ~]# find /test/ -name "x*.cfg"|while read i; do grep "reg.1.random" $i|awk -F"=" '{print $2}'|sed 's/ $//'|sed 's/.\(.\)./\1/'; done
^^^613*
admt130"
^^^613*
123456"
adg8484"
DQitYV09dh1C

---------- Post updated at 04:51 AM ---------- Previous update was at 04:47 AM ----------

Let me give more info:

10

Try This
sed 's/^"\|"$//g' file

this will remove " only at beginning and end

Thanks,
Kalai

11

looks like there are some control characters. Redirect the output after the awk command to a file, and show us the output using cat -ve option.

I mean:

find /test/ -name "x*.cfg"|while read i; do grep "reg.1.random" $i|awk -F"=" '{print $2}' > a

cat -ve a

Guru.

1 Like
12
13 
find /test/ -name "x*.cfg"|while read i; do grep "reg.1.random" $i|awk -F"=" '{print $2}'| sed 's/^M//' | sed 's/ *$//'|sed 's/.\(.*\)./\1/'; done

Ctr-M should be put like this: Ctr-V + Ctrl-M

Guru.

14
15

^M should be put like: Press Ctrl and V, still holding Ctrl, press M

did you do this way?

Guru.

1 Like
16

Try This
sed 's/^"\|"$//g' file

this will remove " only at beginning and end

Thanks,
Kalai

17

@guru...thanks it worked.

An alternate solution:

18

A single double-quote would suffice in tr.

|tr -d '"'
1 Like