How to force escaping of characters in java

Question

I have a string with escape characters in such a way that the when the string is printed it results in another string with valid escape characters. How do i retrieve that string which looks like the one when the first string is printed?

Here's the code - the initial string looks as such:

String string = "{\"agent\":\"{\\\"name\\\":\\\"James Bond\\\"}\"}";
System.out.println("str: "+string);

Executing the code would produce

str: {"agent":"{\"name\":\"James Bond\"}"}

I was to get the string as it appears in the output.

How *does* this String appear in the output? Why `\\\"name\\\"` instead of `\"name\"`? — , Oct 30 '12 at 12:08
well i guess u can simply replace all " and \ with \" and \\. To do so use string.replace — gabrjan, Oct 30 '12 at 12:10
How would you like the String to be printed? Can you give an example? — Gijs Overvliet, Oct 30 '12 at 12:10
Why are you attempting to write/parse json manually? There are a ton of libraries for that. — tier1, Oct 30 '12 at 12:11
The second block of code shows how the string appears in the output. I was working with JSONs when I came across this problem. — Chai Nadig, Oct 30 '12 at 12:11
@chai.nadig: So far everything seems to be as you have specified. How would you like the output to be _different_ from the correct output you have shown? **What is your actual problem?** — hmakholm left over Monica, Oct 30 '12 at 12:12
@HenningMakholm I don't want a different output. I want the escaping of characters to be done so that I get a string which looks like the one in the output. — Chai Nadig, Oct 30 '12 at 12:13
@chai.nadig - this can only be answered properly if you state **clearly** what kind of escaping you want. Is it Java String literal escaping? Is it JSON escaping? Is it something else? — Stephen C, Oct 30 '12 at 12:16
@chai.nadig: If you're already getting the output you want, then what's your problem? It would seem then that you _already_ have the escaping you want in order to get the output you want. — hmakholm left over Monica, Oct 30 '12 at 12:18

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

3

You can use the String unescapeJava(String) method of StringEscapeUtils from Apache Commons Lang.

example:

String in = "a\\tb\\n\\\"c\\\"";

System.out.println(in);
//This prints
// a\tb\n\"c\"

String out = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(in);

System.out.println(out);
//This prints
// a    b
// "c"

You can see more on How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?

edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

Community

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answered Oct 30 '12 at 12:12

MaVRoSCy

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score -1 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 30 '12 at 12:17

-1

i guess u are looking for that

String a="\"agent\":\"{\\\"name\\\":\\\"James Bond\\\"}q\"";

a=a.replace("\\", "\\\\");
a=a.replace("\"","\\\"");

edited Oct 30 '12 at 12:17

MaVRoSCy

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answered Oct 30 '12 at 12:16

gabrjan

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How to force escaping of characters in java

2 Answers2