Question

I have a string with escape characters in such a way that the when the string is printed it results in another string with valid escape characters. How do i retrieve that string which looks like the one when the first string is printed?

Here’s the code – the initial string looks as such:

String string = "{\"agent\":\"{\\\"name\\\":\\\"James Bond\\\"}\"}";
System.out.println("str: "+string);

Executing the code would produce

str: {"agent":"{\"name\":\"James Bond\"}"}

I was to get the string as it appears in the output.

Answer 1

You can use the String unescapeJava(String) method of StringEscapeUtils from Apache Commons Lang.

example:

String in = "a\\tb\\n\\\"c\\\"";

System.out.println(in);
//This prints
// a\tb\n\"c\"

String out = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(in);

System.out.println(out);
//This prints
// a    b
// "c"

You can see more on How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?