How To Escape A JSON String

Quick Answer

JSON escaping replaces the characters a JSON string literal cannot contain, quotes, backslashes, and control characters like newlines, with backslash sequences such as \", \\, and \n. To escape text for JSON, paste it and copy the escaped result; to unescape a JSON string, paste the escaped form and the original text comes back. The tool detects the direction automatically and converts live.

How It Works: JSON String Escaping

A JSON string literal sits between double quotes: "like this". The moment the text inside contains its own double quote, the parser reads it as the end of the string and the document breaks. Real line breaks and tabs are just as illegal inside a JSON string literal. JSON string escaping solves this by writing each forbidden character as a two-character escape sequence that the parser understands: "He said \"hi\"\nand left" stores a quote-containing, two-line sentence in one legal literal.

Which Characters Must Be Escaped in JSON

The JSON escape characters come in exactly three groups, defined by RFC 8259:

• the double quote ", written \"
• the backslash \, written \\
• every control character U+0000 to U+001F; the common ones have short forms (\b \f \n \r \t), the rest use \uXXXX

Everything else, including emoji, accents, and non-Latin scripts, is legal unescaped. However, this tool additionally escapes U+2028 and U+2029 (line and paragraph separators), because JSON allows them raw while JavaScript string literals do not; escaping them makes the output safe to inline into code as well.

JSON Escape vs URL Encode and Other Escapers

Each container has its own escaping rules, and the tools are not interchangeable. JSON escaping protects text inside a JSON string literal with backslash sequences. URL encoding protects text inside a URL with percent sequences like %20. HTML entity encoding protects text inside markup with entities like &. For example, a JSON payload carried in a query parameter needs both, applied in order: escape for JSON first, then URL encode the whole document. The switcher above the tool jumps between all of these encoders with your input preserved.

Escaping also differs from stringifying a document. To escape a JSON string is to protect one value's text; stringifying serializes a whole object into JSON syntax, quotes included. JSON.stringify does both at once for programmatic use, whereas this tool answers the paste-into-an-existing-document case.

Examples

A quoted sentence. He said "hello" escapes to He said \"hello\". The quotes survive the round trip into a config value.

A Windows path. C:\temp\new escapes to C:\\temp\\new. Without the doubled backslashes, \t and \n would silently turn into a tab and a newline when parsed.

A document inside a document. Embedding {"a": "b"} as a string value produces {\"a\": \"b\"}. Therefore each nesting level doubles the backslashes, which is the telltale sign of double escaping.

How to Unescape a JSON String

JSON unescape is the reverse direction. Paste the escaped form, with or without the outer quotes, and the tool parses it back to plain text: \n becomes a real line break, \uXXXX becomes the character it names. Invalid input, for example a dangling backslash or a bad \u sequence, is reported as an error instead of being silently mangled. The direction detector treats input containing escape sequences or wrapped in quotes as an escaped string, and you can override it with the mode select at any time.

Common Mistakes