Escape JSON

Paste text to escape it for use inside a JSON string: double quotes, backslashes, line breaks, tabs and control characters are converted to their JSON escape sequences. Switch to unescape to turn a JSON string back into readable text, or validate and pretty-print a whole JSON document. Everything happens in your browser.

Why JSON strings need escaping

JSON strings are wrapped in double quotes, so a double quote inside the text would end the string early and break the document. The backslash is the escape character, so a literal backslash must be doubled. JSON also forbids raw control characters — including real line breaks and tabs — inside strings; they must be written as escape sequences. Escaping converts text into a form that can sit safely between the quotes of a JSON value.

JSON escape sequences

Characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, such as most emoji, are written as two \u escapes (a surrogate pair) when escaped: 😀 becomes \ud83d\ude00.

Escape, unescape, stringify and format

• Escape turns plain text into the inside of a JSON string, optionally with the surrounding quotes. Use it when pasting text into a JSON file, API request body or configuration value.
• Unescape reverses the process: paste a JSON string (with or without quotes) to see the original text, with real line breaks and quotes.
• Stringify JSON takes a whole JSON document and turns it into a string value — needed when an API expects JSON embedded inside another JSON field, such as a message payload.
• Validate and format checks that a document is valid JSON and pretty-prints it with two-space indentation, pointing to the position of any syntax error.

Worked example

The text He said "hello" followed by a new line and a Windows path C:\Users\Ana escapes to "He said \"hello\"\nPath: C:\\Users\\Ana". The two quotes become \", the line break becomes \n, and each backslash in the path is doubled. With “Escape non-ASCII” turned on, the euro sign € becomes \u20ac, which is handy when the receiving system is not UTF-8 aware.

Escaping in code

In code, always build JSON with a serializer rather than joining strings by hand. Hand-built JSON is the most common source of escaping bugs and can lead to injection problems when user input contains quotes.

Common JSON errors

• Unescaped quotes inside a string — escape them as \".
• Single quotes around strings or keys — JSON requires double quotes.
• Trailing commas after the last item in an object or array are not allowed.
• Comments are not part of JSON; remove // and /* */ lines.
• Raw line breaks inside strings — replace with \n.
• Unquoted keys such as {name: "x"} — keys must be quoted strings.
• Special numbers such as NaN, Infinity or leading zeros are not valid JSON.

JSON escaping vs other escaping

Escaping rules depend on where text ends up. JSON escaping protects the JSON syntax only. When JSON is placed inside HTML, the characters <, > and & may also need escaping to avoid breaking the page or allowing script injection — for example, a string containing </script> inside an inline script block. URLs use percent-encoding, SQL uses parameter binding, and CSV doubles quotes. Using the wrong kind of escaping for the context is a frequent cause of bugs.

Double-escaped strings

If you see text like \\n or \\\", the string has probably been escaped twice — often because JSON was stringified and then stringified again. Run Unescape once to remove one layer; if the result still contains escape sequences and looks like JSON, run it again or switch to Validate and format. When designing APIs, prefer sending nested objects rather than JSON strings inside JSON.

Unicode and encoding

JSON text is normally exchanged as UTF-8, and any Unicode character may appear unescaped in a string. Escaping non-ASCII as \uXXXX makes the output pure ASCII, which can help with older systems, logs or email, at the cost of readability. The two forms are equivalent: a JSON parser reads \u00e9 and é as the same character.

Escaping inside JSON in other files

JSON often travels inside other formats, and each layer adds its own rules. In a shell command, JSON passed to curl with -d must also respect the shell’s quoting: wrap it in single quotes on Linux and macOS, and escape inner double quotes on Windows Command Prompt. In environment variables and .env files, some tools expect the whole JSON value on one line. In YAML, JSON strings are usually safest inside single quotes. When in doubt, save the JSON to a file and pass the file name instead of the raw text.

Privacy

All processing happens locally in your browser. Your text, API payloads and keys are never uploaded, logged or stored — but avoid pasting secrets into any web page on a shared computer.