Quoting is incredibly hard to get right.  If they aren't quoting the whole string, but merely a part in the middle (say, `chars My friend "forgot" to call.`) you're going to miss out on what they probably intended.  You've already trimmed the "outside" spaces, so maybe you could anchor the quotes on each end to make sure you're only removing the very edges?

Something like the below should remove the outside quotes, leaving any internal quotes in place. (Untested, so maybe not!)

```perl
$string =~ s/^\"(.*)\"$/$1/;
```