Escape Text for JSON

Escaping text for JSON means rewriting the few characters that would otherwise break a JSON string. A JSON string starts and ends with a double quote, so a quote in the middle of your text looks like the end of the string and the parser gets confused. A raw line break causes the same trouble, because JSON doesn't allow one inside a string.

The fix is a backslash. A quote becomes \", a line break becomes \n and a backslash itself becomes \\. Every JSON parser reads these sequences and gives back exactly the text you started with, so escaping is simply a safe way to carry that text inside a string.

It isn't encryption and it isn't compression. Nothing is hidden and nothing is lost.

The JSON specification (RFC 8259) is short on this point. Inside a string, three kinds of character must be escaped:

• The double quote ", written as \"
• The backslash \, written as \\
• Control characters below U+0020, such as the line feed \n, the carriage return \r and the tab \t. A control character without a short form is written as a Unicode escape, for example \u0001

Everything else can stay as it is. Accented letters, Urdu and Arabic text, Chinese characters and emoji are all valid inside a UTF-8 JSON string, and this tool leaves them alone. Single quotes never need escaping, because JSON only uses double quotes. The forward slash may be written as \/, but you don't have to.

Say you want to send this message through an API:

She said "hello"
C:\Users\Sam

Pasted straight into JSON, it fails twice over: the quotes end the string early, and the line break and backslashes aren't valid. Escaped, it becomes one safe line:

{"message": "She said \"hello\"\nC:\\Users\\Sam"}

Most people land here in the middle of a practical job, like:

• Writing a JSON request body by hand for a curl command or an API client.
• Putting a multi-line message, an HTML snippet or a SQL query into a config file.
• Preparing test data that contains quotes, apostrophes or file paths.
• Pasting a stack trace or a log line into a JSON payload.
• Adding examples that contain JSON strings to API documentation.

If you're doing this inside a program, don't write the replacements yourself. Every major language has a serializer that does it correctly. In JavaScript, JSON.stringify returns the escaped string wrapped in quotes, so slice the quotes off if you only want the inside:

const text = 'She said "hello"\nC:\\Users\\Sam';
const escaped = JSON.stringify(text).slice(1, -1);

import json

escaped = json.dumps(text)[1:-1]

A few slips cause most of the 'unexpected token' errors people hit after escaping:

• Escaping the whole document instead of one value. Run an entire JSON object through an escape tool and you get a string, not an object. Escape only the text that goes inside a string value.
• Escaping twice. If you see doubled backslashes where you expected single ones, the text was already escaped once. Use JSON Unescape to peel a layer off.
• Forgetting the backslashes in Windows paths. C:\Users has to be written C:\\Users inside JSON.
• Adding quotes twice. This tool leaves the outer quotes off, so add them yourself, once.
• Wrapping a string in single quotes. JSON strings only use double quotes. Single quotes are fine inside the text, but they can't wrap it.

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