JSON Escape and Unescape

Escape or unescape in one step

• Encode escapes the input and wraps it in quotes, ready to paste as a JSON value. A JSON document pasted here becomes a string containing that JSON, which is what you need when an API expects JSON inside a string field.
• Decode unescapes a JSON string. The surrounding quotes are optional. If the result is JSON itself, it's formatted with indentation so you can read it.

Example: the two lines He said "hi" and second line become "He said \"hi\"\nsecond line".

Which characters JSON escapes

Inside a JSON string, the double quote, the backslash and control characters (U+0000 to U+001F) must be escaped. Everything else, including accented letters and emoji, can appear as is in UTF-8.

Single quotes never need escaping in JSON, and \' is actually invalid. That's a common mistake when JSON is built by hand from JavaScript or SQL strings.

Unescaping JSON from logs

Logs, message queues and some APIs store JSON as a string, so you get something like:

"{\"orderId\":1042,\"items\":[{\"sku\":\"A-17\",\"qty\":2}]}"

Paste it with Decode selected and you get the formatted object back. If it was escaped twice (you still see \" after decoding), click ⇄ Swap and decode again.

Escaping JSON in code

// JavaScript
JSON.stringify('He said "hi"')        // returns: "He said \"hi\""
JSON.parse('"line\\nbreak"')            // "line\nbreak"

// Java with Jackson
String quoted = new ObjectMapper().writeValueAsString(text);

# Python
import json
json.dumps('He said "hi"')            # '"He said \\"hi\\""'
json.loads(escaped)

Let the JSON library escape values for you when building payloads. Concatenating strings by hand is how unescaped quotes end up breaking requests.

Frequently asked questions

Related tools

JSON validator to check the unescaped result, JSON formatter, JSON minifier, Encode / Decode and URL encoder.