JSON Stringify and Unstringify

JSON stringify turns a JSON document into a single string value that can be stored in a field, sent as a message body or written to a log. Unstringify does the reverse. The tool does both, and works out which direction you want from what you paste.

Escaping is what makes the round trip possible. A JSON string cannot contain a raw double quote, so every " becomes \", every backslash becomes \\, and every line break becomes \n. The result is valid JSON, and unreadable to a human.

The layer problem

This is the part that wastes an afternoon.

Escaping is not idempotent. Each time a payload passes through a service that stores it as a string, it is escaped again. A webhook body logged by a queue and then written to an aggregator arrives escaped two or three times over:

"{\"event\":\"order.created\",\"payload\":{\"id\":\"TV-40182\"}}"

Unescape that once and you get JSON. Start one layer further out and unescaping once leaves you with something that still looks broken, so you paste it into the tool again, and again, guessing at how deep it goes.

This tool peels every layer in one pass and shows the chain it removed, so you can see that the payload was escaped three times rather than wondering whether you are done.

The paste people actually make

Copying an escaped payload out of a log rarely brings the surrounding quotes with it. What lands in your clipboard is this:

{\"id\":1,\"ok\":true}

That is not parseable JSON – it is the inside of a string with no string around it – so most tools reject it. This one puts the quotes back and parses it anyway.

Escaping in the other direction

Paste JSON, choose Escape, and you get a single string value ready to assign to a field in another document. Two options change the output:

Wrap in quotes includes the surrounding double quotes, as a real JSON string value has. Turn it off when you are pasting into something that supplies its own quotes.

Escape non-ASCII turns accented and non-Latin characters into \u sequences. JSON is UTF-8 and does not require this, but some older parsers, database drivers and terminal tools handle pure ASCII more predictably.

What the result tells you

After unescaping, the tool says whether what came out is valid JSON or plain text. That distinction matters when you are debugging: if the result is not valid JSON, the escaping was still removed correctly, and what was inside was either plain text or JSON that was already broken before anything escaped it. Knowing which one it is tells you where to look next.

The counts underneath show how many escape sequences were involved, broken down by quotes, backslashes, newlines and unicode escapes. On the escape side it also shows how many bytes the escaping added.

When this is not the right tool

If your JSON is fine and you only want it smaller or more readable, use the JSON Minifier instead – that is a different job. If you are working inside a language rather than a browser, JSON.parse and JSON.stringify, Python’s json.loads, or jq -r do this in one line and belong in your code, not in a tab. And if what you have is not escaping at all but URL encoding – %22 rather than \" – the URL Encoder and Decoder is the right page.

Everything here runs in your browser. Tokens, webhook bodies and customer payloads are never uploaded, which matters for exactly the kind of content that ends up escaped in a log in the first place.