String Escape Tool

How to use

1. 1Pick the Escape direction (raw text in, language literal out) or Unescape (paste a literal, see the original characters). Use Swap to switch quickly.
2. 2Choose your target language from the grouped list: JavaScript (double, single, template), JSON, Python (str, raw, bytes), HTML attribute, XML CDATA, CSS, shell (single, double, ANSI-C), SQL (ANSI or MySQL), or C, Java, C#.
3. 3Paste your text on the left. Toggle Escape non-ASCII as \uXXXX if your output must stay ASCII-only, and Wrap output in quotes to get a complete pasteable literal.
4. 4Read the formatted output on the right with character, byte, and length-change stats. Copy the result, or use Use as input to chain another conversion through a different target.

About this tool

String Escape Tool turns any text into a ready-to-paste string literal for nineteen popular targets, and turns the literal back into the original characters when the target's escape rules are unambiguous. The supported targets are JavaScript (double-quoted, single-quoted, and template literal), JSON (RFC 8259), Python str, Python raw r'...', Python bytes b'...', HTML attribute (double and single quote variants with entity encoding for &, <, >, and the active quote), XML CDATA sections (with safe splitting of any embedded ]]> sequence), CSS strings (with the \HHHHHH plus space hex escape), POSIX shell single-quoted, POSIX shell double-quoted (escaping $, backtick, backslash, and quote), bash ANSI-C quoting $'...', ANSI SQL (single-quote doubling, used by PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and SQLite), MySQL backslash escaping (\\, \', \", \n, \r, \t, \0, \Z), and C, Java, and C# string literals. Each target uses the exact escape conventions a parser for that language expects so the output drops straight into source code or a SQL statement without any further fix-up. Two output options apply where they make sense: an Escape non-ASCII as \uXXXX toggle that forces every code point above U+007F into the language's Unicode escape form (handy when your build target only accepts ASCII source bytes), and a Wrap output in quotes toggle that adds the surrounding quote pair so the result is a complete literal you can paste between commas in an array or after an assignment. The unescape direction reads either a bare escaped body or a full quoted literal: the wrap pair is detected and stripped before parsing. Stats below show input and output character count, input UTF-8 byte count, and the length delta so you can see at a glance how much the escape grew or shrank the text. Useful for embedding multi-line text inside a JSON config field, building a SQL INSERT from an exported CSV, preparing a Python data fixture, dropping a quoted user-agent string into a curl one-liner, hardening an HTML attribute against an injection bug, decoding a stack-trace string back into the original message, or recovering the source text from a JSON-escaped log line. Everything runs in your browser with small per-target encoders. The text you paste here is never uploaded.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.