String Escaping and Unicode

JSON strings are always delimited by double quotes. Any character that would break the string—or be ambiguous—must be escaped with a backslash.

Common escape sequences

Sequence	Meaning
\"	Double quote inside a string
\\	Literal backslash
\n	Newline
\t	Tab
\r	Carriage return
\b	Backspace
\f	Form feed

Example:

{
  "message": "Line one\nLine two",
  "path": "C:\\Users\\dev\\config.json"
}

Unicode escapes

Use \uXXXX for a Unicode code point with exactly four hex digits:

{
  "greeting": "Hello, \u4e16\u754c"
}

For characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, UTF-16 surrogate pairs appear as two \u escapes in JSON—most editors and parsers handle this when reading/writing UTF-8 files.

Characters you cannot put raw in strings

Control characters (U+0000 through U+001F) must be escaped. Unescaped line breaks inside strings are invalid JSON—use \n instead.

UTF-8 files vs escaped Unicode

A .json file saved as UTF-8 may contain literal Chinese or emoji characters:

{ "label": "世界" }

That is valid JSON. Escaped \u forms are equivalent when normalized—choose whichever keeps your pipeline and diff tools happiest.

Practical tips

• When copying strings from logs, watch for smart quotes " "—they are not valid JSON delimiters.
• API docs often show \n in examples; your parser converts them to real newlines in memory.
• If validation fails inside a long string, search for unescaped backslashes or broken \u sequences.