JSON Escape & Unescape — String Encoder

Which characters must be escaped in JSON?

Everything else, including emoji and accented letters, is allowed as-is in UTF-8 JSON. Tick ASCII only to write non-ASCII characters as \uXXXX for systems that cannot handle UTF-8. The forward slash may optionally be escaped as \/, which some servers do to keep </script> out of inline JSON.

JSON inside JSON

Some APIs and message queues carry a JSON document as a string field — for example an SQS message body or a webhook payload. JSON → string produces that double-encoded form; String → JSON removes one layer of escaping and pretty-prints the inner document, which is the quickest fix for the dreaded "{\"id\":1}" in logs.

In code

JSON.stringify(text)      // escape (JavaScript)
JSON.parse(escaped)       // unescape
json.dumps(text)          # Python
json.loads(escaped)

Need URL or HTML escaping instead? Use the URL encoder or HTML entity encoder.

Tools that pair well with the JSON Escape & Unescape

• Base64 Encode / Decode — Convert text to Base64 and back with full UTF-8 support (accents, emoji), switch to URL-safe Base64, or drop a file to get its Base64 string or data URI.
• JSON Diff — Find exactly what changed between two JSON documents — API responses, config versions, fixtures or exports — as a list of paths with old and new values.
• JSON to YAML — Paste JSON and get clean YAML for Kubernetes manifests, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions or any config file.
• YAML to JSON — Paste YAML — a Compose file, Kubernetes manifest or CI config — and get formatted JSON.