remove leading and trailing quotes I have a field that may start and end with quotes. I only want to remove the quotes if the string starts and ends with quotes. If quotes exists inside the string then I wish to retain them.

I have used REVERSE and stuff which works if the field does start and end with quotes but if it does not it just returns null.

How can I ensure I still get the field result if it did not start with quotes?

What I have:

REVERSE(STUFF(REVERSE(STUFF(fieldname, CHARINDEX('"', fieldname), LEN('"'), '')), CHARINDEX('"', REVERSE(STUFF(fieldname, CHARINDEX('"', fieldname), LEN('"'), '')), 1), 1, ''))
You could try something like this

SELECT CASE WHEN RIGHT(fieldname,1) = '"' AND LEFT(fieldname,1) = '"' THEN REVERSE(STUFF(REVERSE(STUFF(fieldname, 1, 1, '')), 1, 1, '')) 
       WHEN RIGHT(fieldname,1) = '"' THEN REVERSE(STUFF(REVERSE(fieldname), 1, 1, '')) 
       WHEN LEFT(fieldname,1) = '"' THEN STUFF(fieldname, 1, 1, '')
       ELSE fieldname END as fieldname
FROM #temp;


DB&lt;>Fiddle