Java Escape / Unescape

Paste your text, pick Escape or Unescape in the Mode select, and press Convert. Escape produces an ASCII-only Java string literal — non-ASCII characters become \uXXXX escapes, with surrogate pairs above U+FFFF; Unescape reverses all of it, surrogate pairs included.

Because the toolchain between you and production might not: build servers with mis-set encodings, diff tools, older editors. \u escapes make the string's bytes irrelevant — the literal is pure ASCII and means the same thing everywhere. It's the convention .properties files enforce for exactly that reason.

Two. Java strings are UTF-16, so any code point above U+FFFF is written as a surrogate pair: 🗼 (U+1F5FC) becomes \ud83d\uddfc, and Unescape reassembles the pair into the original character. Everything from U+007F upward is escaped this way — é is \u00e9, an em dash \u2014. Line breaks deliberately come out as \n rather than \u000a, because javac expands \u escapes before it tokenizes the file, and a \u000a would end the literal mid-string.

Text blocks (Java 15+) remove the need to escape most quotes and let line breaks stand as themselves, which makes multi-line HTML, SQL or JSON snippets far more readable in source. They don't remove escaping entirely, though: \uXXXX and \n/\t still work inside a text block exactly as in a regular literal, and a lone " or a run of three quotes still needs \" to avoid ending the block early.

Because javac expands \u escapes before it tokenizes the source file, not while it reads the string literal. A \u000a inside a literal becomes an actual line break at that earlier pass, and an unescaped newline inside a regular string literal is a compile error — so this tool always writes a real newline as \n, never as \u000a, and Unescape treats the two as different inputs for the same reason.