How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?

user_108915 0
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I'm processing some Java source code using Java. I'm extracting the string literals and feeding them to a function taking a String. The problem is that I need to pass the unescaped version of the String to the function (i.e. this means converting \n to a newline, and \\ to a single \, etc).

Is there a function inside the Java API that does this? If not, can I obtain such functionality from some library? Obviously the Java compiler has to do this conversion.

escaping java string
11 Answers

Java 13 added a method which does this: String#translateEscapes.

It was a preview feature in Java 13 and 14, but was promoted to a full feature in Java 15.

user_31797590

org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils from commons-lang3 is marked deprecated now. You can use org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils#unescapeJava(String) instead. It requires an additional Maven dependency:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-text</artifactId>
            <version>1.4</version>
        </dependency>

and seems to handle some more special cases, it e.g. unescapes:

  • escaped backslashes, single and double quotes
  • escaped octal and unicode values
  • \\b, \\n, \\t, \\f, \\r
user_17250960

For the record, if you use Scala, you can do:

StringContext.treatEscapes(escaped)
user_3127080
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