How it works
Escaping means replacing characters that have a special meaning in a format with a sequence that represents them unambiguously. This tool does that, and undoes it, for the three cases that come up most often:
- HTML: turns
&,<,>, double quotes and single quotes into entities. That is what you need to show code or user text inside a page without the browser treating it as markup. When unescaping, it understands named and numeric entities. - JSON string: produces the content of a valid JSON string, with
\n,\t,\"and\\. Use it to embed a piece of text, an error message or a SQL block in a JSON file or a test. - Unicode
\u: turns everything that is not ASCII into\uXXXXsequences, including the surrogate pairs of emoji. It is useful for properties files, code that must be pure ASCII, or to see which invisible characters a copied text carries.
Pick the format and the direction, escape or unescape, and the output updates as you type. If a sequence is invalid, for example a code point above 10FFFF, you see the error instead of a half-finished result. Everything happens in your browser.
Examples
Escape HTML before showing it on a page
<a href="/search?q=1&lang=en">Tom's</a>
<a href="/search?q=1&lang=en">Tom's</a>
Turn text into Unicode \u sequences
café ☕ 🚀
caf\u00e9 \u2615 \ud83d\ude80
Frequently asked questions
Which characters does HTML mode escape?
The five that can break markup or open an injection: & < > " and the single quote. When unescaping, it also understands numeric entities such as é or é and the most common named entities.
Why does an emoji become two \u sequences?
JavaScript and JSON represent characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane as a UTF-16 surrogate pair. 🚀 is U+1F680 and is written \ud83d\ude80; when unescaping, the pair becomes a single character again.
When should I use JSON string mode?
When you need to put text with line breaks, tabs, quotes or backslashes inside a JSON or JavaScript string. The output is the content between the quotes, ready to paste.