Java - String replace first and last character upon condition, which method is faster?

I have a list of thousands of strings that may come in the form:

word

or

"more than one word"

I want to remove the "" whenever they are present, so that I can save the string to my DB.

I'm wondering which method is faster:

1. Using line.replace("\"","");


2. Validating that first character is '"', then making a substring from character 1 to length - 1.

Or even, is there a better way to do this?