Escaping characters in a string

Question

I have a string that contains escaped characters:

String myString = "I\\nam\\na\\nmultiline\\nstring\\twith\\ttabs";

I would like to convert the escaped characters so that it would output:

System.out.println(myConvertedString);

I
am
a
multiline
string    with    tabs

Is there any standard function (maybe Guava) that does this?

what??? what do you get if you print the "non scaped string"?? — ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ, Jun 26 '17 at 16:58
you have this : ***String foo = "I\nam\na\nmultiline\nstring\twith\ttabs";*** — ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ, Jun 26 '17 at 16:59
seems like compile time error to me , if you have string like this without proper escaping — Pavneet_Singh, Jun 26 '17 at 16:59
No, I am given a string foo="I\\n\\am...", assume I can't change this because it is the output of some library function. If you want I can give all the details... — Benjy Kessler, Jun 26 '17 at 17:00
@ΦXocę웃Пepeúpaツ I think OP says the strings *value* is `I\nam\na\nmultiline\nstring\twith\ttabs`, which would be given as `"I\\nam\\na\\nmultiline\\nstring\\twith\\ttabs"` if a Java literal. — Andreas, Jun 26 '17 at 17:01
So, Call a string replace and replace every occurrence of "\\" with "\" — Jsleshem, Jun 26 '17 at 17:01
@Andreas check [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44764799/escaping-characters-in-a-string#comment76510694_44764799) comment of OP — Pavneet_Singh, Jun 26 '17 at 17:02
I am trying to convert an exception to string and called the printStackTrace method and pass in a ByteArrayOutputStream. When I convert the ByteArrayOutputStream to a String, this is what I get. — Benjy Kessler, Jun 26 '17 at 17:02
Possible duplicate of [How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?](https://stackoverflow.com/q/3537706/5221149). But it depends. Is that a Java-escaped string? Or JavaScript? Or C? Or some other language? They are all mostly the same, but there are differences. — Andreas, Jun 26 '17 at 17:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 26 '17 at 17:04

1

If you have received the exception from a stack trace, the only escaped characters are probably \n and \t, in which case:

String converted = input.replace("\\n", "\n").replace("\\t", "\t");

If there can be more than that I think you'll have to list all the possibilities.

answered Jun 26 '17 at 17:04

assylias

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This will work for my use case but I thought there might be a more generic solution. It's surprising that this doesn't exist since the code clearly exists within the Java compiler. – Benjy Kessler Jun 26 '17 at 17:11

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 26 '17 at 17:05

1

StringEscapeUtils in the apache commons library has many methods that will escape, or unesecape a string as required.

StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava(someString);
StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(someOtherString);

answered Jun 26 '17 at 17:05

MaxPower

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Thanks, unfortunately I can't use Apache commons in my project but this looks good. – Benjy Kessler Jun 26 '17 at 17:09
@BenjyKessler is it? Do you have a source? – MaxPower Jun 26 '17 at 17:12
https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/apidocs/org/apache/commons/lang3/StringEscapeUtils.html#unescapeJava-java.lang.String- – Benjy Kessler Jun 26 '17 at 17:13
as of 3.6, use commons-text StringEscapeUtils instead, so they want you to use a different package – MaxPower Jun 26 '17 at 17:14

Escaping characters in a string

2 Answers2