JSON Escape Tool

What Is the JSON Escape Tool?

This tool escapes plain text so it is safe inside a JSON string -- escaping special characters (quotes, backslashes, newlines, tabs, and other control characters) via JSON.stringify and then removing the surrounding quotes -- useful when hand-embedding text into a string that is already inside a JSON payload or config file.

How to Use This Tool

Paste your plain text. The escaped JSON string literal appears instantly, ready to copy.

Exactly What Gets Escaped

The tool runs your text through the standard JSON string encoder and then removes the outer pair of double quotes that the encoder adds. The output is therefore the escaped body of a string, ready to paste between quotes you already have in your JSON file, not a complete quoted literal. This matters: if you paste the result into a spot where you expect the tool to have supplied the quotes, you will be missing them. Add your own opening and closing double quote around the output when you need a full string value.

The characters that get rewritten are the ones JSON does not allow raw inside a string:

• A double quote becomes a backslash followed by a double quote.
• A backslash becomes two backslashes.
• A line break becomes the two characters backslash and n, and a carriage return becomes backslash and r.
• A tab becomes backslash and t.
• Other control characters (below code point 32) become backslash-u escapes with four hexadecimal digits.

Ordinary letters, digits, punctuation, spaces and non-English characters such as accented letters or emoji are left as they are. Forward slashes are not escaped either.

Worked Example

Suppose you have a two-line note with a quote in it: the first line reads She said "stop" and the second line reads C:\temp. After escaping, the single line you get back reads She said \"stop\"\nC:\\temp. Every quote gained a backslash, the line break was replaced by the two-character sequence backslash-n, and the lone backslash in the file path was doubled. Wrapped in quotes, this is a valid JSON string that a parser will turn back into your original two lines.

Typical Situations Where This Helps

• Putting a multi-line message or an HTML snippet into a JSON configuration file or an API request body by hand.
• Storing a Windows file path or a regular expression as a JSON value, where backslashes are the most common source of parsing errors.
• Preparing a long text for a translation file or a test fixture, where writing the escapes by hand invites mistakes.
• Debugging a payload that a server rejects with a syntax error, by escaping the suspect text and comparing it to what you sent.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Escaping twice. If you paste text that is already escaped, every backslash is doubled again, and the receiving system will show literal backslash sequences instead of line breaks. Escape the raw text only once.
• Escaping a whole JSON document. This tool is meant for a single string value. If you paste an entire object, the braces and quotes will be escaped too and the result will no longer be an object. To tidy a whole document, use a JSON formatter instead.
• Forgetting your own quotes. Since the outer quotes are removed, add them yourself.
• Assuming the output is safe for other contexts. JSON escaping is not the same as HTML escaping or shell escaping. Text placed into a web page still needs HTML encoding, and text inserted into a database query should use parameterised queries, not manual escaping.

Limits

Because the conversion is done by the browser's built-in JSON handling, it is reliable and fast, and nothing is sent to a server. Very large pastes may make the page sluggish. A lone surrogate character (a broken half of an emoji) is written as a unicode escape in current browsers, which keeps the output valid. If you want to reverse the process, the JSON Unescape Tool on this site does that.

Frequently Asked Questions