Python Escape / Unescape

Choose Escape or Unescape, then a style — str for ordinary Python 3 source, ASCII-only for output that must be pure ASCII (config files, some CI logs), or bytes for a b"..." literal — and press Convert. The output is the literal's body: wrap it yourself in the quote character your code uses.

Because Python indexes strings by code point, not by UTF-16 code unit, so there is nothing to pair: 😀 is one code point (U+1F600) and gets exactly one escape, eight hex digits wide, capital U. Compare that with JavaScript or Java, whose strings are UTF-16 internally — a code point above U+FFFF has no single 16-bit slot, so those languages write it as two \u escapes representing a high and low surrogate. \xe9 for é follows a different rule: \x is always exactly two hex digits, so it only covers U+0000–U+00FF, and é (U+00E9) fits inside that range with room to spare.

str assumes your source file is UTF-8 (the Python 3 default) and only escapes the characters a literal actually needs escaped — quotes, backslashes and control characters — leaving accented letters and emoji untouched, so the output stays human-readable. ASCII-only reproduces what repr() shows you in a terminal that can't render Unicode, or what you'd want in a file a strict ASCII-only tool has to parse: everything above U+007E becomes an escape. bytes targets a b"..." literal specifically, where the content is raw bytes rather than text, so a non-ASCII character has to become the UTF-8 bytes that would actually be stored — each one written as its own \xNN.

Paste it as-is — the tool detects and strips one layer of surrounding quotes, plus an optional b/r prefix, so 'don\'t' and b'hi\\x41' both unescape correctly on their own. repr() of a single-quoted string escapes an embedded single quote as \', which this tool decodes like any other named escape. If your text is meant to be used as a regular-expression pattern afterward, remember that a raw string (r"...") disables backslash processing entirely on the Python side — escape it here only if the string you're building is NOT a raw string.

Because that is what CPython itself does: an escape sequence it doesn't recognize (\d, \q, and similar) is left in the string unchanged — both the backslash and the character survive — rather than raising an error. Since Python 3.6 this has emitted a DeprecationWarning, and 3.12 upgraded it to a SyntaxWarning, but the string still parses. This tool mirrors that behavior exactly and reports how many unrecognized escapes it kept, so you can tell a genuine typo from an intentional regex pattern that was never meant to be unescaped — regex patterns belong in a raw string, or through the [Regex Escape](/regex-escape) tool instead.