JSON Escape and Unescape

What escaping does

A JSON string is wrapped in double quotes, so a double quote inside it has to be written as \". The backslash itself is the escape character, so a literal backslash becomes \\. Characters that would break the line, such as line breaks, tabs and carriage returns, become \n, \t and \r, and other invisible control characters become \u followed by four hex digits. Nothing else needs escaping: accented letters, other scripts and emoji are valid inside JSON strings as they are, and so is the forward slash. The result is exactly what JSON.stringify(text) returns in JavaScript or json.dumps(text, ensure_ascii=False) returns in Python.

Stringifying JSON

Sometimes a whole JSON document has to travel as a string: a message body inside another JSON payload, a value in an environment variable, a field in a database column, or a test fixture in source code. Paste the JSON and leave Minify JSON first on: valid JSON is compacted to one line before it is escaped, which keeps the string short. Turn on Wrap in quotes for a complete literal you can paste straight into code, or off when the surrounding quotes already exist.

Unescaping

Switch to Unescape to go the other way. You can paste a full literal with its outer quotes, "{\"a\":1}", or just the inside, {\"a\":1}, as it often appears in logs. Raw line breaks are read as \n, so text copied from a terminal still works. If the unescaped text is itself JSON and Format unescaped JSON is on, it is pretty-printed so you can read it at once.

Values that were escaped twice, for example JSON inside JSON inside a log line, still show backslashes after one pass. Click Use as input and unescape again; each pass removes one layer.

Errors

Unescaping fails when the text is not a valid JSON string. The common causes are a quote that was never escaped, which ends the string early; an invalid escape such as \q or a Windows path with single backslashes like C:\data; and a \u escape without exactly four hex digits. The error names the problem and its column.

Related tools

To make the JSON smaller without escaping it, use the JSON minifier. For Base64 rather than string escaping, use Base64 Encode and Decode, and for query strings use the URL encoder.