How are emoji handled?

In \uXXXX form, characters above U+FFFF (like 😀) are written as a surrogate pair of two \u escapes; U+ and HTML forms use the single code point (e.g. U+1F600, 😀). Decoding reassembles them correctly either way.

What can the decoder read?

It auto-detects \uXXXX, \u{XXXXX}, \xXX, U+XXXX, &#xHEX; and &#DEC; — all in the same input, so mixed escapes still decode.

What does 'escape all characters' do?

Off, only non-ASCII characters are escaped and plain ASCII stays readable. On, every character is converted to an escape, which is handy for fully obfuscated or strictly-ASCII output.

No. Encoding and decoding happen entirely in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.

Unicode Escape Converter

Turn text into Unicode escape sequences and back. Encode to JavaScript/JSON \uXXXX (with surrogate pairs for emoji), Unicode U+XXXX notation, or HTML hex (&#xHEX;) and decimal (&#DEC;) entities — keeping plain ASCII readable, or escaping every character. Decoding auto-detects all of these formats at once (plus \u{...}, \xXX and bare U+ notation), so you can paste mixed escapes and get the original text. Useful for embedding non-ASCII safely in code and JSON, debugging encoding issues, and reading escaped strings from logs. Everything runs locally in your browser.

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Input

FormatEscape all characters

Output

caf\u00e9 \ud83d\ude00

How to use

Pick a direction: Text → Escapes or Escapes → Text.
For encoding, choose the format and whether to escape every character or just non-ASCII.
Copy the result from the output box.

Frequently asked questions

How are emoji handled?: In \uXXXX form, characters above U+FFFF (like 😀) are written as a surrogate pair of two \u escapes; U+ and HTML forms use the single code point (e.g. U+1F600, 😀). Decoding reassembles them correctly either way.
What can the decoder read?: It auto-detects \uXXXX, \u{XXXXX}, \xXX, U+XXXX, &#xHEX; and &#DEC; — all in the same input, so mixed escapes still decode.
What does 'escape all characters' do?: Off, only non-ASCII characters are escaped and plain ASCII stays readable. On, every character is converted to an escape, which is handy for fully obfuscated or strictly-ASCII output.
Is my text uploaded?: No. Encoding and decoding happen entirely in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.

Guides on this topic

Unicode Normalization and Invisible Characters Why two identical-looking strings can fail an equality check, what NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD actually do, which invisible characters hide in pasted text, and the rules that keep text handling safe.

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