JSON Escape Online — Escape Strings for JSON

RFC 8259 defines exactly which characters must be escaped and how. The OpenFormatter JSON escape tool delegates to the browser's native JSON.stringify, which is the canonical implementation of the spec — no upload, no server, no rate limits.

How to escape a string for JSON — 4 steps

1. Paste your raw text. Multi-line, quote-heavy, backslash-laden — any string goes into the Input panel. Click Load Sample to load a Windows path with embedded quotes.
2. Click Run. The escaper invokes JSON.stringify on your machine and produces a fully-quoted RFC 8259 string literal.
3. Verify the output. Every " is now \", every \ is \\, newlines are \n, tabs \t, and the result has surrounding double quotes.
4. Drop it into your JSON. Paste the literal as a value in a JSON object, an HTTP request body, or a JS source file — it parses cleanly with JSON.parse.

Sample raw input vs escaped JSON literal

{
  "path": "C:\Users\file.txt",
  "msg": "He said "hello"",
  "tab": "col1	col2"
}

"{\n  \"path\": \"C:\\Users\\file.txt\",\n  \"msg\": \"He said \"hello\"\",\n  \"tab\": \"col1\tcol2\"\n}"

Common use cases

• check_circleEmbedding a multi-line SQL query, regex, or shell script as a JSON string field
• check_circleEscaping Windows file paths (C:\Users\...) before they hit a JSON config
• check_circlePreparing raw stack traces or log lines for shipment to Elasticsearch / Loki
• check_circleDropping a code snippet into a Slack webhook payload that requires JSON
• check_circleEmbedding HTML or XML markup as a JSON value without breaking parsing
• check_circleEncoding error messages with embedded quotes for an API error response
• check_circleBuilding Postman / Insomnia request bodies that contain quote characters
• check_circleRound-tripping arbitrary text through a JSON column in PostgreSQL or MongoDB

JSON escape vs JS escape vs URL encode

All three encode special characters, but each targets a different parser. JSON escape follows RFC 8259 — it permits only "-delimited strings, has no \xNN or \u{…}, and produces output that JSON.parse can read. JavaScript escape is a superset: it allows single quotes, hex bytes, and ES6 code-point escapes, so JS-escaped output is not always valid JSON. URL encode uses percent-encoding (%20, %2F) and is for query strings and path segments, not string literals. Pick the one that matches the destination parser, or you will produce technically-encoded output the destination still rejects.