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JSON string escaping explained

By Abhishek Jaiswar · Published 2026-10-03

A JSON string is wrapped in double quotes and a few characters need a backslash. Most escaping bugs come from encoding twice or not at all.

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What must be escaped

Inside a string, the double quote, the backslash and every control character below U+0020 must be escaped.

\" is a double quote
\\ is a backslash
\n is a newline, \r a carriage return, \t a tab
\b is a backspace, \f a form feed
\u00e9 is a unicode escape with four hex digits

What does not need escaping

Non-ASCII characters can be written as they are in UTF-8. The forward slash may be written as \/ but does not have to be. A raw line break inside a string is invalid, so multi-line text uses \n.

Double-encoded JSON

A common API pattern stores a JSON document inside a string field. The inner quotes are escaped, and the value looks like a wall of backslashes. Parse the outer document, then parse that string value again.

JSON inside a string

{"payload": "{\"id\": 7, \"ok\": true}"}

Inner value after parsing it again

{"id": 7, "ok": true}

Symptoms of wrong escaping

Windows paths such as "C:\temp" break, because \t is read as a tab. Write "C:\\temp".
An "Unterminated string" error often means an unescaped quote ended the string early.
Visible \n sequences in output mean the text was escaped twice.

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