JSON Escape and Unescape

A JSON string starts and ends with a double quote, so a quote inside the text would end it early. Escaping puts a backslash in front of the characters that would break the string, and writes line breaks and tabs as \n and \t, because a JSON string must stay on one line.

{"note": "She said "hi""}          ✗ invalid: the string ends at "She said "
{"note": "She said \"hi\""}        ✓ reads as: She said "hi"

Unescaping is the reverse. It turns \", \n and \u00e9 back into ", a real line break and é, so you can read a message copied out of a log, an API response or a database.

JSON has only a handful of escapes. Some are required, some optional, and a few that look familiar aren’t allowed at all:

Emoji and other characters beyond \uffff are written as two codes, for example 😀 is \ud83d\ude00. Leaving them unescaped is fine as long as the JSON is saved as UTF-8.

Switch the tool to Unescape and paste the escaped text, with or without its outer quotes. Error messages and stack traces in logs are the usual case: Error: \"timeout\"\n at fetch (app.js:12:5) becomes a readable message with real line breaks.

• Escaped JSON documents. If the result is JSON itself, the tool says so and formats it for you.
• Text escaped twice. \\\" only becomes \" after one pass. The tool spots leftover escapes and offers to unescape again.
• Invalid escapes. \', \x41 and a single backslash in a Windows path aren’t JSON. They are listed with their position instead of failing the whole text.

Each language’s JSON library escapes for you. To get just the escaped text, without the outer quotes:

// JavaScript
const escaped = JSON.stringify(text).slice(1, -1);
const plain = JSON.parse('"' + escaped + '"');

# Python
escaped = json.dumps(text, ensure_ascii=False)[1:-1]
plain = json.loads('"' + escaped + '"')

// C#
string escaped = JsonEncodedText.Encode(text, JavaScriptEncoder.UnsafeRelaxedJsonEscaping).ToString();
string plain = JsonSerializer.Deserialize<string>("\"" + escaped + "\"");

// Java (Jackson)
String escaped = new String(JsonStringEncoder.getInstance().quoteAsString(text));
String plain = new ObjectMapper().readValue("\"" + escaped + "\"", String.class);

// PHP
$escaped = substr(json_encode($text, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES | JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE), 1, -1);
$plain = json_decode('"' . $escaped . '"');

The unescape lines are strict: they fail on a raw line break, a stray quote or \', which is where the tool above is more forgiving. To escape a whole JSON document into a quoted string in one step, see JSON Stringify.