Gregory:

With the understanding that you are asking to clean a comma separated value file by first removing what may truly be escaped double quotes in a text field; you may not need to do this. CSV see RFC and Wiki wiki . A good way to represent fields in CSV is to have all fields surrounded by double quotes. This way you can have commas inside field that need to represent long text that has a comma and/or double quotes, even tabs and returns. So what you may need to try is import the file as a "Table". Here is a quick example

ImportString["\"1\",\"2\r3\",\"2ec\"\n\"2\",\"3\",\"3d3\"", "Table", 
{"FieldSeparators" -> ",", "TextDelimiters" -> {"\""}, 
  "LineSeparators" -> {"\n"}, "CharacterEncoding" -> "ASCII", 
  "HeaderLines" -> 0, "EmptyField" -> "", 
  "RepeatedSeparators" -> False, "Numeric" -> False}]

This should return something like this

{{"1", "2
  3", "2ec"}, {"2", "3", "3d3"}}

If your data contains date you may need to define your "DateStringFormat" options. You will need to experiment with these options and use Import[] instead of ImportString[]. Hans

Hi David and Hans,

Thanks for the good insights on formatting characters. By playing with different combinations of Import (CSV vs. Table) and the options you suggested, I was able to reduce 139 bad cases to 55. All of this resulted from my collaborator copy and pasting hand-collected data from web pages, especially HTML tables. You know, highlight a little too much and you grab the wrong thing.

I'll keep at it.

Thanks once again,

Gregory