How to remove double quotes inside double quotes

Question

I have a problem and cannot figure out what to do.

Question: I need to remove a double quote, inside double quotes

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String example:

"MIKE YANICK","412 A AVE "E"," ","NADIEN PA"," ","190445468"

As you can see, the letter E inside "412 A AVE "E" has an extra double quote.

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I need to remove it.

Here is what my outcome should be:

"MIKE YANICK","412 A AVE E"," ","NADIEN PA"," ","190445468"

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• I cannot use expressions because the pattern changes every time.
• The string.replace will not work, because you would need to hard code the values
• Reading values in between double quotes does not work, because it gets thrown off by the quote in the middle

Please help...

Answer 1

You could use a regular expression like this:

(?<!(^|,))"(?!(,|$))

This will match any double quote (") that isn't proceeded by the start of the string, or a comma, and isn't followed by a comma or the end of the string.

Answer 2

This works with your example:

Regex.Replace("\"MIKE YANICK\",\"412 A AVE \"E\",\" \",\"NADIEN PA\",\" \",\"190445468\"",
    "(?<=\")([^,]*)(?=\")",
    m => m.Value.Replace("\"", string.Empty)) ;

Output:

"MIKE YANICK","412 A AVE E"," ","NADIEN PA"," ","190445468"