Text to JSON String — Paste It Into a Payload

Turn text into a JSON string literal, quotes included. Two invisible line terminators are escaped as well, so the value pastes into curl or a fixture.

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What this tool does

Your text becomes a JSON string literal: surrounding quotes, and every character that cannot appear raw replaced by its escape.

" becomes \", a backslash becomes \\;
a newline becomes \n, a tab \t, a carriage return \r;
other control characters become \u00XX.

é and 😀 stay as they are. JSON is Unicode, and a legible string is better than a wall of escapes.

Two characters that plain encoders leave raw

U+2028 (line separator) and U+2029 (paragraph separator) come out as \u2028 and \u2029. A standard JSON encoder leaves them literal.

Both spellings are valid JSON. The escaped one is safer, and the reason is historical and still live: in JavaScript before ES2019, those two characters were line terminators, so a string literal containing one raw was a syntax error. Anything that takes JSON and evaluates it as JavaScript — an old eval, a JSONP endpoint, a bundler inlining a data file — hits that. Escaping costs three extra characters and removes the whole class of failure.

A lone surrogate does not produce broken output

Text can contain half of a surrogate pair — a string sliced at the wrong index, a truncated field out of a database. The output escapes it as \ud800 rather than emitting it raw.

That matters because a raw lone surrogate cannot be encoded in UTF-8 at all. Escaped, the JSON is still valid, still UTF-8, and the damaged character is visible in the output rather than corrupting the file that carries it.

What is not escaped

The forward slash. \/ is legal JSON, and some encoders emit it so that </script> never appears in the output, but it is not required and it makes the result harder to read.

If you are embedding the result in an HTML page, handle </script> at the HTML level — an HTML parser closes the element at that sequence wherever it appears, and no amount of JSON escaping changes that.

Private by design

Everything runs locally in your browser with JavaScript. Your data is never uploaded, which makes the tool safe for sensitive content, and it keeps working offline.

Frequently asked questions

Why is é not escaped as \u00e9?: Because JSON is a Unicode format and `é` is a legal character in a string. The document encoding carries it. Escaping every non-ASCII character is only needed when the channel is ASCII-only — that is what Python’s `ensure_ascii=True` is for — and it makes the output larger and harder to read for no benefit otherwise.
Why does the output include the quotation marks?: Because a JSON string *is* the quotes plus the escaped content. Handing you the inside only would invite pasting it somewhere the quotes are missing, which is exactly where the escaping stops being correct. You can delete them if your template already supplies them.
Can I paste this straight into a <script> tag?: Not blindly. This produces valid JSON, and the two line terminators that used to break JavaScript literals are escaped. But an HTML parser still ends the script element at the first `</script>` in the source, string or not — so text containing that sequence needs the tag handled separately, at the HTML level.