JavaScript String Unescape

JavaScript unescape: read escaped strings

The JavaScript unescape tool interprets backslash escape sequences exactly as a JavaScript engine does when it parses a string literal. It is handy for reading minified bundles, log output that prints strings with \n instead of real line breaks, or localisation files full of \u00e9-style sequences.

Note that this has nothing to do with the deprecated global unescape() function, which decodes %XX percent sequences. For those, use the URL Decoder.

Supported sequences

• Single-character escapes: \n \r \t \b \f \v \0 \\ \" \' and \/.
• Two-digit hex: \x41 → A.
• Four-digit Unicode: \u00e9 → é, and surrogate pairs like \uD83D\uDE80 → 🚀.
• Code point escapes from ES2015: \u{1F680} → 🚀.
• Line continuations: a backslash directly before a line break is removed along with the break.

Unknown escapes follow JavaScript’s lenient rule: the backslash is dropped and the character kept, so \q becomes q. A malformed Unicode escape such as \u12 is reported as an error with its position, just as a real parser would refuse it.

Example

Input:

Rocket: \u{1F680}\tHex: \x41\nCaf\u00e9 \q

Output:

Rocket: 🚀	Hex: A
Café q

Where escaped JavaScript strings come from

• Minified bundles. Minifiers and bundlers often write non-ASCII text as \uXXXX escapes so the output is pure ASCII, which makes translated UI strings unreadable when you debug production code.
• Logs and error reports. Anything printed with JSON.stringify or a debugger shows line breaks as \n and quotes as \".
• Translation files and fixtures that were exported with ASCII-only settings, where every accented letter looks like \u00e9.
• Obfuscated snippets that hide readable words behind \x escapes. Decoding them is a quick first step when reviewing unfamiliar code before you run it.

Tips

• Remove the outer quotes before pasting if you copied a whole literal; otherwise they stay in the output as ordinary characters.
• Decoded text can contain invisible characters such as tabs, NUL or zero-width spaces. Copy the output into a hex viewer if something looks right but still fails a comparison.
• If the text is JSON rather than JavaScript, JSON Unescape applies JSON’s stricter rules.
• To escape text again after editing it, switch to JavaScript Escape or edit the Raw text box here: the Escaped JavaScript box then updates with the escaped form.

Decoding runs in your browser; your code is not uploaded unless you click Save & Share to create a link.