JSON Escape / Unescape

JSON Escape / Unescape is a tool that converts arbitrary text into a form that is safe to place inside a JSON string value, and reverses the process. Escaping replaces the characters that would break a JSON string - the double quote, the backslash, and control characters such as newlines and tabs - with their backslash escape sequences (\", \\, \n, \t, and \uXXXX). Unescaping turns those sequences back into the original raw characters.

This is different from formatting or validating JSON. A JSON formatter works on the structure of a whole document; this tool works on the contents of a single string. You reach for it when you need to embed a block of text - an HTML snippet, a SQL query, a multi-line log message, a code sample - inside a JSON field, or when you have a JSON-escaped string and want to read the original text behind all the backslashes.

Everything runs 100% in your browser with a hand-written escaper, so the text you paste - which is often a payload, a config value, or a piece of source code - never leaves your device. Optional settings let you wrap the result in double quotes to produce a complete JSON string literal, escape all non-ASCII characters as \uXXXX for maximum portability, or escape the forward slash for safe embedding inside a <script> tag.

Escaping is about producing a string that survives being embedded in JSON, which is a narrower job than it sounds. Control characters below U+0020 must be escaped and cannot appear literally, which is why a string containing a real newline is invalid until converted to a backslash n. Forward slashes may be escaped and do not have to be, a legacy of embedding JSON in HTML script tags where the sequence closing a script element would otherwise terminate it early. Unicode above the basic plane is stored as surrogate pairs, so a single emoji becomes two escape sequences and a string split in the middle of that pair is corrupt.