JSON Unescape Online

What does unescaping JSON do?

When text is stored inside a JSON string, special characters are written as backslash sequences: \n for a newline, \" for a quote, \u00e9 for é. Unescaping reverses that. It turns the sequences back into the characters they stand for, so you can read the content or parse it again.

You'll typically need this when a log line, a message queue payload, or a database column contains JSON that was saved as a string. It looks like "{\"orderId\":42,\"items\":[...]}", which is hard to read and impossible to query until it's unescaped.

Features

• With or without quotes: paste "..." or just the inner content.
• Double-escape detection: strings that were serialized two or three times are unwrapped layer by layer, and the tool tells you how many layers it removed.
• Auto pretty-print: if the result is valid JSON, it's formatted with 2-space indentation.
• Precise errors: invalid escape sequences are reported with their line and column.
• Unicode aware: \uXXXX escapes and emoji surrogate pairs are decoded correctly.

Example: unescaping a logged payload

"{\"event\":\"signup\",\"user\":{\"name\":\"Zoë\",\"plan\":\"pro\"},\"note\":\"line1\nline2\"}"

{
  "event": "signup",
  "user": {
    "name": "Zoë",
    "plan": "pro"
  },
  "note": "line1\nline2"
}

Escaped vs. double-escaped

Each layer doubles the backslashes before it. If you control the producer, fix the root cause. It's almost always a JSON.stringify or json.dumps call on a value that was already a JSON string.

How to unescape JSON in code

JavaScript

// One layer of escaping
const escaped = '"{\\"id\\":1,\\"name\\":\\"Ada\\"}"';
const json = JSON.parse(escaped);   // '{"id":1,"name":"Ada"}'  (a string)
const obj  = JSON.parse(json);      // { id: 1, name: 'Ada' }   (an object)

// Unwrap any number of layers
function deepParse(value) {
  while (typeof value === 'string') {
    try { value = JSON.parse(value); } catch { break; }
  }
  return value;
}

Python

import json

raw = '"{\\"id\\": 1, \\"name\\": \\"Ada\\"}"'
inner = json.loads(raw)   # '{"id": 1, "name": "Ada"}'
data = json.loads(inner)  # {'id': 1, 'name': 'Ada'}

Command line (jq)

# Parse a JSON-encoded string field from the command line
echo '{"payload":"{\"id\":1}"}' | jq '.payload | fromjson'

Need the opposite direction? Use the JSON Escape tool.

Frequently asked questions