Unicode Escape Converter

📖 Tool Introduction

Convert between text and escape sequences of the form backslash u followed by four hex digits, and look up the code point of each character.

Escaped text of this kind turns up constantly when working with JSON interfaces, configuration files and anything being debugged across an encoding boundary. Chinese arrives as a run of escapes that nobody can read, and the first job is turning it back into characters. The other direction is just as common, since some transport layers and some older parsers only accept the escaped form, and the text has to be written that way before it is sent.

There is one detail here that decides whether the tool is trustworthy. Ordinary Chinese characters sit in the basic plane, so four hex digits are enough. But emoji and a good number of rarer characters sit in the supplementary planes, and JavaScript represents those internally as a pair of surrogates. Handling the string one code unit at a time splits a single emoji into two escapes that are each invalid on their own, and decoding that back produces garbage rather than the character. This tool recognises the surrogate pair, treats it as one character, and emits the two escapes that belong together.

The code point mode simply reports the U+ value of each character, which is what you want when you are checking a character against a table or comparing two things that look identical but are not. That last case is more common than it sounds: two characters that render the same can have different code points, and the only way to see it is to look at the numbers.

The result reports the input and output size, and everything runs in the browser so nothing is uploaded.

The mode that reports code points is the one worth reaching for when two things look the same and behave differently. A homoglyph, a character borrowed from another script, or a character with an invisible mark attached will render almost identically to the one you meant, and no amount of comparing them side by side will show why a search for one misses the other. The numbers make it obvious. The same applies to normalisation, where one character can be written as a single code point or as a base letter with a combining mark, and the two forms sort and match differently even though they display the same.

✨ Key Features

• Both directions between text and escape sequences
• Surrogate pairs recognised, so emoji are not broken apart
• A code point mode giving the U+ value of each character
• Handles Chinese and rare characters alike
• Input and output sizes shown at a glance
• Runs locally: nothing is uploaded

🚀 How to Use

1. Type text or an escaped sequence on the left
2. Pick the direction on the right
3. Press process, or use Ctrl plus Enter
4. The result box shows the converted output
5. Copy result puts it on your clipboard

⚠️ Things to Note

• Data source: Based on Unicode code points and escape sequence rules; conversion runs in the browser
• Surrogate pairs: Supplementary characters are emitted as a pair of escapes; half of one cannot be decoded alone
• Unescaping is strict: Only the standard form of backslash u plus four hex digits is decoded; anything else is left as it is
• Case insensitive: Hex digits are read correctly in either case
• Privacy: Everything runs in the browser. What you paste is never sent to a server