How are emoji handled?

Most emoji are above U+FFFF. Depending on the format you get a surrogate pair (😀), a single \u{1F600}, Python's \U0001F600 or Go's \U0001F600 — and unescaping recombines pairs automatically.

Does unescaping need me to pick a format?

No. Auto-detect handles \uXXXX, \u{…}, \UXXXXXXXX, \xXX, %uXXXX, &#x…;, &#…;, U+XXXX and the standard backslash escapes in one pass. CSS escapes have their own mode because \b is ambiguous.

What does the Inspector flag?

Zero-width characters, bidirectional overrides (the "Trojan Source" trick), non-breaking and other unusual spaces, characters that look like ASCII but are not (Cyrillic а, fullwidth Ａ), typographic quotes and dashes, combining marks, private-use and unassigned code points, and words that mix scripts.

Why are the character and grapheme counts different?

string.length counts UTF-16 units, so an emoji is 2. Code points count each Unicode scalar, and graphemes count what a person sees — a flag or a family emoji is one grapheme but several code points.

What do the NFC / NFD buttons do?

They normalize the text: NFC composes é into one code point, NFD splits it into e + combining acute, and the NFK forms also fold compatibility characters like ﬁ or fullwidth letters. Databases and file systems usually expect NFC.

Unicode Escape / Unescape

Escape Unicode text into the exact form your language expects — JavaScript/JSON/Java \uXXXX with surrogate pairs, ES2015/Rust \u{…}, \xXX, Python \U00XXXXXX, Go, CSS \41 , HTML &#x…;, legacy %uXXXX or plain U+XXXX notation — including the standard \n \t \\ \" escapes. Unescaping auto-detects all of those formats in one pass and reports malformed or out-of-range escapes with their position. The Inspector tab lists every code point with its name, general category, block, UTF-8 and UTF-16 bytes, grapheme count, and flags zero-width, bidirectional, look-alike, mixed-script and non-standard-space characters, with NFC/NFD/NFKC/NFKD normalization buttons.

Runs locally in your browser

Long strings? Open fullscreen for room

Text

0 chars · 1 line

Escaped (\uXXXX)

Output will appear here…

Format

Escape non-ASCII onlyStandard escapes (\n \t \\ \" …)Uppercase hex

Code points above U+FFFF become a UTF-16 surrogate pair (two \u escapes) — what JSON, Java and C# expect.

String Escape / Unescape

Escape or unescape strings for JSON, JS, HTML, XML, URL, regex, shell, CSV, SQL, Python, Java, C#, Go, YAML and .properties.

HTML Entity Encode / Decode

Encode text to HTML entities with presets (minimal, attribute-safe, all non-ASCII) and decode all 2,000+ HTML5 named references.

Text to Binary

Convert text or files to binary, hex, octal or decimal bytes and back, with a hex dump, per-character byte table and five encodings.

URL Encode / Decode

Percent-encode text with encodeURIComponent, encodeURI, form or RFC 3986 rules, decode multi-layer strings, and edit query strings in a table.

How to use Unicode Escape / Unescape

1Pick Escape or Unescape and paste your text — the output updates as you type.
2When escaping, choose the format in Options (\uXXXX, \u{…}, \xXX, Python, Go, CSS, &#x…;, %uXXXX or U+XXXX), decide whether to escape only non-ASCII, and keep standard escapes for \n \t \\ and quotes.
3When unescaping, leave Auto-detect on: every backslash, HTML, %u and U+ form is decoded in one pass, and malformed escapes are reported with their position.
4Open the Inspector tab to see each code point with its name, category, block, UTF-8 and UTF-16 bytes, and warnings for invisible, bidirectional, look-alike or mixed-script characters.
5Use the NFC / NFD / NFKC / NFKD buttons to normalize, "Strip invisible characters" to clean pasted text, and Swap (⌘⇧S) to go back and forth.

About Unicode Escape / Unescape

Unicode Escape / Unescape is part of FizzKit — a collection of focused developer and ad-tech tools. Because everything runs locally, it works offline once loaded and never exposes your data to a remote server.

Frequently asked questions

The 4-digit form covers U+0000–U+FFFF; anything above must be written as a surrogate pair (two \u escapes), which is what JSON and Java require. The brace form (ES2015, Rust, Swift) writes any code point up to U+10FFFF directly.

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