which is better?

[Skaperen]

which is better?

0.

    if s[0] == "'" and s[-1] == "'":

1.

    if (s[0],s[-1]) == ("'","'"):

2.

    if (s[0]+s[-1]) == "''":

or any other suggestions?

[ichabod801]

I would say the first one is the most readable code of the three. I would also consider a regular expression or:

if s.startswith("'") and s.endswith("'")

[metulburr]

+1 for ichabod's suggestion

[Skaperen]

I would say the first one is the most readable code of the three. I would also consider a regular expression or:

if s.startswith("'") and s.endswith("'")

i'm going to be removing the quotes.  anything better than:

    if s.startswith("'") and s.endswith("'"):
        s = s[1:-1]

?
FYI, s comes from repr() which will have the quotes if a string is given to it, but those will be awkward for the usage, which is to be part of a filename.

[buran]

s = "'some'string'"
print s
print s.strip("'")

Output:
'some'string'
some'string

Given the additional info I would consider skipping the if part and clearing the quote even if only in begining or only at the end

[Skaperen]

if there are quotes in the middle, i want to keep them.  i'm removing the quotes that repr() adds to a string, but it might have not been a string.  i should make some variant code for unicode (v2), bytes (v3), and bytearray.