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
– ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ, Commented Jun 26, 2017 at 16:58
you have this : String foo = "I\nam\na\nmultiline\nstring\twith\ttabs"; — ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ
– ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ, Commented Jun 26, 2017 at 16:59
So, Call a string replace and replace every occurrence of "\\" with "\" — Jsleshem
– Jsleshem, Commented Jun 26, 2017 at 17:01
Possible duplicate of How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?. 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
– Andreas, Commented Jun 26, 2017 at 17:03

MaxPower · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-26 17:05:37Z

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, 2017 at 17:05

MaxPower

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4 Comments

Benjy Kessler Over a year ago

Thanks, unfortunately I can't use Apache commons in my project but this looks good.

MaxPower Over a year ago

@BenjyKessler is it? Do you have a source?

Benjy Kessler Over a year ago

commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/apidocs/org/apache/…

MaxPower Over a year ago

as of 3.6, use commons-text StringEscapeUtils instead, so they want you to use a different package

assylias · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-26 17:04:13Z

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, 2017 at 17:04

assylias

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1 Comment

Benjy Kessler Over a year ago

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.

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