How to delete the first and last two characters from a text file using sed?

bash, command-line, sed, string-parsing

Solution

sed  's/^.\(.*\)..$/\1/'  file

Problem

I have a text file like this ``` abcdefg abcdefg abcdefg abcdefg ``` How to delete the first and last two characters from each line with sed? I would like to get the output like this ``` bcde bcde bcde bcde ```

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