Java String Escape & Unescape

How to use Java String Escape & Unescape

1. 1

   Choose Escape or Unescape.

2. 2

   Paste text or use the tested sample.

3. 3

   Choose whether to wrap the result in quotes or escape non-ASCII UTF-16 code units.

4. 4

   Run the conversion, then copy or download the result.

What this tool does

Escape mode protects backslashes, double quotes, control characters, tabs, and line endings so text can be pasted into a Java string literal.

Unescape mode accepts either a quoted literal or raw escaped content and decodes Java's standard single-character, Unicode, and octal escapes.

Features and options

• Quoted or unquoted output
• Optional non-ASCII Unicode escaping
• Standard Java escapes including \n, \t, \r, quotes, and backslashes
• Unicode \uXXXX and Java octal decoding
• UTF-16-safe browser processing

Technical information

The escaper iterates over JavaScript UTF-16 code units. Supplementary Unicode characters are therefore represented by a surrogate pair when non-ASCII escaping is enabled, matching Java's UTF-16 source model.

The decoder rejects trailing backslashes, unmatched outer quotes, malformed Unicode sequences, and unsupported escape markers instead of silently changing them.

Common use cases

• Embedding text in Java source
• Preparing test fixtures and log messages
• Inspecting escaped API or configuration values
• Decoding Java literals during debugging

Limitations

• This is a string-literal converter, not a Java compiler.
• It does not parse text blocks, concatenated expressions, variables, or source-code comments.
• Unicode escapes are decoded as a convenience even though the Java compiler processes them before ordinary literal escapes.