Unicode Escape

A Unicode escape sequence (\uXXXX) writes a character as its code point instead of the character itself — so a string literal in code can contain any Unicode character while the source file itself stays plain ASCII.

How to use it

• Encode: paste text and every non-ASCII character gets replaced with its matching \uXXXX sequence.
• Decode: paste a string containing \uXXXX sequences to get plain, readable text back.
• Characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (most emoji) are encoded as a surrogate pair of two sequences.

Common uses

• Reading JSON or JS code where non-ASCII text was pre-escaped into \uXXXX for compatibility.
• Inserting a character that's not on the keyboard into code via an explicit Unicode escape.
• Debugging why a string with an emoji shows up as two odd characters — recognizing a surrogate pair.

Things to keep in mind

\uXXXX encodes exactly one 16-bit UTF-16 unit, not one visible character — characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (most emoji) need two such sequences together (a surrogate pair).

JSON only requires escaping for control characters and a few special characters — escaping every character as \uXXXX isn't required, though it is valid.