Remove double quote \" symbol from string

You can try this. Note that what you actually want is to remove \", not "\ (as proposed in the unedited version of your question). The first " you need to represent each element in the character.

gsub('[\"]', '', data)

If it is always 1st character then just use substring:

substring(data, 2)

This should be faster than any regex solution.

data <- rep(data, 1000)

microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  a = substring(data, 2),  
  b = gsub("\"", "", data, fixed = TRUE),
  c = gsub('"', "", data),
  d = gsub('[\"]', '', data),
  e = stringr::str_replace(data, '[\"]', ''),
  f = gsub("^.","",data)
  )
# Unit: milliseconds
# expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max neval
#    a  2.835013  2.849838  2.933796  2.857393  2.900301  4.446956   100
#    b  4.728632  4.739751  4.788882  4.754861  4.795203  5.200185   100
#    c  7.388025  7.413684  7.503427  7.458444  7.555520  8.160925   100
#    d  7.390876  7.412686  7.530044  7.454453  7.533568  8.535544   100
#    e 12.019154 12.205608 12.430870 12.316084 12.581081 13.917336   100
#    f 15.712882 15.735975 15.875353 15.770043 15.861275 18.906262   100

Use fixed = TRUE to match the pattern as a string:

gsub("\"", "", data, fixed = TRUE)

Or we can just use '"' on the pattern

gsub('"', "", data)