JSON String Escape Unescape

Escape turns any text into a valid JSON string: wrapped in double quotes, with quotes, newlines, tabs, backslashes and control characters all escaped. Unescape does the reverse — paste a JSON string and get the plain text back. Paste it, pick a file, or drag and drop one. If Unescape cannot read the input, the tool names the rule that was broken and shows you where.

• Escape — Wraps your text in double quotes and escapes internal quotes, newlines, tabs, backslashes and control characters, so the result is a valid JSON string literal that any parser accepts.
• Unescape — Parses a JSON string such as "a\nb" and returns the plain string. A bare body without surrounding quotes works too, which is what you get when you copy a value out of a JSON file.
• Paste, upload, or drop — Paste from the clipboard, use the file picker, or drag a file onto the drop area. UTF-8 and UTF-16 files are detected from their byte-order mark, so a file exported from PowerShell reads correctly instead of arriving as garbage.
• Swap and start over — Swap sends the result back into the input and flips the direction, so a round trip is one press. Start over clears the queue, the result and the file picker together.

When you embed user input or multi-line text in JSON or in source code, it needs proper escaping, or a quote or a newline breaks the syntax around it. Escape gives you the exact string literal to paste. When you already have an escaped string — out of an API response, a log aggregator, a configuration file — and you want to read the real text, Unescape reverses it. Both directions run instantly and keep working with no connection once the page has loaded.

• Writing a config or a fixture — You have a multi-line certificate, SQL statement or template and need it as one JSON value. Escape it, and the newlines become \n rather than breaking the file.
• Reading a log line — Structured logging serialises the message, and often the whole event a second time. Unescape it and the stack trace becomes readable lines again instead of one row of \n and \".
• Debugging an API response — A field that arrives as a string containing JSON is a double-encoded payload. Unescape it once to get the inner document, then send that to the JSON Formatter.
• Pasting into source code — A literal that is going into JavaScript, Python or Go needs its quotes and backslashes escaped. Escape without the surrounding quotes, and paste the body between quotes you already have.

The JSON grammar requires exactly two characters to be escaped inside a string — the double quote and the backslash — plus every control character below U+0020. Seven of those have a short two-character form; the rest use a \u00XX sequence. This is the complete list, and the tool produces exactly it.

One consequence is worth spelling out: escaping and unescaping are exact inverses. Whatever combination of options you choose, unescaping the result gives back the text you started with, character for character, including whitespace at both ends.

The most common reason an unescape looks like it did not work is that the value was escaped more than once. Each round of serialisation doubles the backslashes, so a message that started as a newline becomes \n, then \\n, then \\\\n. One pass removes one layer, and what is left still looks escaped.

• Leave the depth on Auto — The tool keeps peeling while the result is still a quoted JSON string, up to ten layers, and then stops. It tells you how many layers came off, so you always know what happened.
• Set an exact depth to stop part way — Choose 1, 2 or any number up to 10 to peel exactly that many layers. Useful when the inner value is a document you want to hand to the JSON Formatter rather than decode further.
• The peel test is deliberately strict — A layer is only removed when what is left is genuinely a quoted JSON string that parses. Ordinary prose that happens to mention \n is never peeled, so the tool cannot chew through text that was only ever plain.
• Watch the layer count — If the tool reports fewer layers than you expected and the result still contains escapes, the remaining ones were never valid — usually a hand-edited log line with a stray backslash in it. Run Escape on the result to see exactly where it stops making sense.

• Wrap in quotes — On by default. The result is a complete JSON string literal, ready to paste as a value. Turn it off to get only the escaped body, for pasting between quotes that already exist in your source.
• Escape non-ASCII as \uXXXX — Off by default. Every character above U+007F becomes a \uXXXX sequence, so the literal is pure ASCII. Emoji and other characters outside the basic plane become two escapes, which is what a parser expects.
• Escape forward slashes — Off by default. Writes / as \/, which is legal JSON and stops the sequence </script> inside a string from closing an HTML script tag early.
• Escape line separators — Off by default, and unavailable while non-ASCII escaping is on because that already covers it. Writes U+2028 and U+2029 as escapes so the literal is safe to paste into JavaScript source.
• Unescape depth — Auto by default. Controls how many layers of nesting are removed. See the section above.
• Counts and ratio — Every result shows characters in and out, bytes in and out, and the growth ratio — the number that matters when the value has to fit a column or a payload limit.

When Unescape refuses, it names the rule that was broken and gives the line and column, computed from the position in your text rather than read out of a parser's own English message. That is why the message is in your language and the highlighted position is correct on every locale.

Everything happens on your own device. There is no upload step, no queue on a server and no copy of your text anywhere but in the tab you have open. That is also why it is fast: nothing has to travel.

• Free — One file at a time, up to 10 MB, with every option and every depth available. Pasting goes through the same check, so there is nothing to work around.
• Pro — No fixed size cap — up to what your device can handle — plus up to 20 files at once and every result delivered as a single archive.
• Speed — A 10 MB document escapes in about 22 milliseconds and unescapes in about 21. Conversion runs off the main thread, with progress and a Cancel button that genuinely stops the work rather than hiding it.
• What is never sent — Your text, your file names and your results. The tool keeps working after the page has loaded even with the network switched off, which is the simplest way to check the claim yourself.
• Formats it opens — .json, .txt, .log, .ndjson, .jsonl, .md, .csv, .tsv, .xml, .yaml, .yml, .sql, .env and .ini. Anything else is refused at the file picker, with a link to the tool that does open it — a spreadsheet goes to Excel to JSON, a document to Word to text.

A 10 MB document escapes in about 22 milliseconds on a mid-range laptop, and runs off the main thread so the page never freezes.

• JSON Formatter

  Pretty-print and indent a whole JSON document.

• JSON Validator

  Find the exact position of a syntax error.

• JSON Minifier

  Strip whitespace from a document before storing it.

• JSON Viewer

  Browse a large document as a collapsible tree.

• JSON to XML

  Convert a document to XML.

• JSON to YAML

  Convert a document to YAML.

• Base64 Encoder / Decoder

  The other encoding a string often needs.

• URL Encoder / Decoder

  Percent-encoding for query strings and paths.

• All JSON tools

  Every JSON tool on the site.