How should I escape strings in JSON?

In JSON, certain characters must be escaped in strings. These characters are:

  • " (double quote)
  • \ (backslash)
  • / (forward slash)
  • \b (backspace)
  • \f (form feed)
  • \n (new line)
  • \r (carriage return)
  • \t (horizontal tab)

To escape these characters in a string, you can use the \\ sequence to escape the backslash, and the \" sequence to escape the double quote.

Here is an example of a JSON string with some escaped characters:

"message": "Hello \nWorld \t\"Foo Bar\" \\Baz"

This string will be interpreted as:

Hello
World     "Foo Bar" \Baz

You can also use the escapeJson method of the org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils class to automatically escape special characters in a string for use in JSON. Here is an example:

import org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils;

String input = "Hello \nWorld \t\"Foo Bar\" \\Baz";
String escaped = StringEscapeUtils.escapeJson(input);
System.out.println(escaped); // prints "Hello \nWorld \t\"Foo Bar\" \\Baz"

If you are using a JSON library to generate JSON strings, such as Gson or Jackson, you don't need to manually escape the special characters. The library will handle the escaping automatically.