String Escape Tool

Escaping and encoding overlap but are not identical. Escaping inserts a marker character — usually a backslash or an entity — so a parser treats the next character as literal data rather than a command, like turning a quote inside a JavaScript string into \" or a < in HTML into &lt;. Encoding maps characters to an entirely different representation for safe transport, such as percent-encoding a space to %20 in a URL or Base64 turning bytes into ASCII. In practice the term "escape" covers both ideas because the goal is the same: stop a special character from being misread. This tool handles the escape-style transforms developers hit most — JavaScript, JSON, HTML, XML, CSS, RegEx, SQL, CSV, and Markdown — plus URL percent-encoding. Pick the format that matches where the string will live, and it applies the correct rules for you.

In SQL the character that breaks queries most often is the single quote, because it ends a string literal early; the standard fix is to double it, so O'Brien becomes O''Brien. Backslashes and other metacharacters can matter depending on the database. This tool's SQL mode applies that quote-doubling for you, and its built-in preset even shows the classic Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- injection string so you can see what unescaped input would do. Important caveat: manually escaping quotes is a last resort, not real protection. The correct defense against SQL injection is parameterized queries or prepared statements, where the database treats user input as data and never as executable SQL. Use this tool to understand and debug escaping, or to safely embed a literal value, then paste your string into SQL mode to preview the escaped result.

JSON strings are wrapped in double quotes, so any double quote inside the value ends the string early and the parser throws a syntax error. The same happens with raw line breaks, tabs, and backslashes, because JSON does not allow literal control characters inside a string — they must be written as escape sequences like \n for a newline, \t for a tab, and \" for an embedded quote. When you paste text copied from a document or an API response that still has real newlines in it, the structure collapses. This tool's JSON mode rewrites those characters into valid escape sequences in one step, so the string drops cleanly into a payload or config file. Switch to unescape to reverse it and read the decoded text. Paste your value, choose JSON, and copy the parser-safe result.

Regular expressions reserve a set of metacharacters that carry special meaning, so to match them literally you must escape each one with a backslash. The common ones are the dot (.), asterisk (*), plus (+), question mark (?), caret (^), dollar sign ($), parentheses ( ), square brackets [ ], curly braces { }, the pipe (|), and the backslash itself. For example, to match a literal period in a price you write \. instead of ., because a bare dot matches any character. Forgetting this is a frequent source of patterns that match far too much or fail silently. This tool's RegEx mode scans your text and backslash-escapes every metacharacter automatically, which is ideal when you need to feed a fixed string — like a URL or file path — into a pattern. Paste the value, select RegEx, and copy the safe pattern fragment.

CSV treats commas as column separators and newlines as row separators, so any field that actually contains a comma, a line break, or a double quote must be wrapped in double quotes; otherwise a stray comma shifts every column after it. When the field already has a double quote, that inner quote is escaped by doubling it, so she said "hi" becomes "she said ""hi""". This quoting rule comes from the RFC 4180 convention that spreadsheet tools like Excel and Google Sheets follow. Doing it by hand across a column of values is tedious and easy to get wrong. This tool's CSV mode applies the wrapping and quote-doubling for you, and batch mode lets you process many lines at once with the same rule. Paste your fields, choose CSV, and copy output that imports cleanly without breaking the column layout.