Escaping encodes the characters that are not legal inside a JSON string — double quotes, backslashes, newlines, tabs and other control characters — exactly as a valid JSON string literal would represent them.

What is the difference between escape here and a JSON string literal?

This tool gives you the escaped body — the part between the outer quotes. If you also need the surrounding double quotes to paste a complete string literal, use the JSON String Escape tool, which wraps the result in quotes.

How accurate is the conversion?

Escaping uses the browser's built-in JSON.stringify and unescaping uses JSON.parse, so the result matches the official JSON specification, including \\uXXXX unicode escapes. Invalid escape sequences are reported as an error rather than guessed.

How is a newline represented?

A literal line break becomes \\n, a tab becomes \\t, a double quote becomes \\" and a backslash becomes \\\\. Decoding reverses each of these back to the original character.

What happens with non-ASCII or emoji characters?

They round-trip correctly. The native serialiser may emit \\uXXXX escapes for some characters; unescaping resolves those escapes back to the original Unicode characters.

Why do I get an error when unescaping?

Unescaping uses JSON.parse, so an invalid escape sequence (for example a lone backslash or a malformed \\u code) is rejected with the parser error rather than guessed at, keeping the result trustworthy.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No — all encoding and decoding runs locally in your browser and nothing is sent to a server.

JSON Escape / Unescape

JSON escape and unescape

When you need to drop raw text — a multi-line message, a snippet containing quotes, a log line — into a JSON document, every special character has to be escaped first. This tool converts raw text into a valid JSON string body and decodes escaped strings back to plain text, using the browser’s own JSON engine so the result is spec-correct.

How it works

Escaping wraps your text with JSON.stringify and removes the outer quotes, leaving just the escaped body. Unescaping wraps your input in quotes and runs JSON.parse. Because both use the native engine, every rule of the JSON spec is honoured, including \uXXXX unicode escapes.

Character	Escaped as
`"` (double quote)	`\"`
`\` (backslash)	`\\`
newline	`\n`
tab	`\t`
carriage return	`\r`
control / non-ASCII	`\uXXXX` (where needed)

Example

Escaping the two-line text:

Hello "world"
Line two

produces the body:

Hello \"world\"\nLine two

Unescaping that body restores the original two lines exactly. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.