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Unescape a JSON string literal back into plain text.
Your result will appear here.
The reverse of the JSON Escape Tool -- takes JSON-escaped text and decodes it back to plain, readable text via JSON.parse. The tool adds the surrounding quotes itself before parsing.
Paste the escaped text without surrounding quotes (e.g. Line 1\nLine 2). The decoded plain text appears instantly.
The tool takes the text you paste, adds a double quote at each end itself, and hands it to the standard JSON parser. That means you should paste only the escaped body of a string, without its outer quotes, for example He said \"hi\" rather than "He said \"hi\"". If you paste text that already has its own outer quotes, the extra quotes will be treated as part of the content and will normally cause the parse to fail.
When the text cannot be parsed, the tool does not show an error message. It falls back to showing your original input unchanged. So if the output looks identical to what you pasted and you expected changes, that is the sign the input contained something invalid, such as a stray unescaped quote, an unknown escape like a backslash followed by a random letter, or a raw line break in the middle of the text.
Imagine a log line copied from an API response reads: Order failed\nReason: \"card declined\"\nPath: C:\\orders. Pasting the body into the tool produces three readable lines: Order failed, then Reason: "card declined", then Path: C:\orders. That is much easier to read than the single escaped line, and you can copy the decoded version into a bug report.
This tool is handy when reading strings copied from browser developer tools, server logs, JSON exports, or configuration files, where multi-line content is squeezed onto one line. It is also useful for checking what a string will actually look like once a program parses it, before you ship it. For inspecting a whole JSON document rather than one string value, a JSON formatter is the better fit.
Decoding happens locally in your browser, so logs or messages you paste are not transmitted. Even so, avoid pasting secrets such as passwords or API keys into any online page out of habit.
The tool does not show an error -- if the text cannot be parsed (for example an unescaped double quote or an invalid escape sequence), it silently returns your original input unchanged. If the output looks the same as the input, check for invalid escapes.
No. The tool adds the outer quotes itself, so paste only the escaped content. Extra quotes will usually make the decode fail.
The output simply shows your original text unchanged instead of an error. If nothing changed, look for unescaped quotes, single backslashes or raw line breaks.
Yes. Backslash-u sequences with four hexadecimal digits are converted to the matching characters.
It treats the whole box as one string. Decode values one at a time, or use a JSON formatter for a full document.
Reference: MDN Web Docs