Why is my emoji two escape sequences?

Characters above U+FFFF don't fit in a single UTF-16 code unit, so they are written as a surrogate pair — a high surrogate (\ud800–\udbff) followed by a low one. The decoder recombines the pair into the single intended character.

Does it handle \x and octal escapes?

\xNN byte escapes are supported alongside \uXXXX and \u{...}. For octal or decimal character codes, use the Octal & Decimal to ASCII Decoder.

Why does JSON escape characters at all?

So the output is valid across transports that assume ASCII. It is optional in JSON — both the escaped and the literal form are legal and mean the same thing.

Unicode Escape Decoder

Decode \uXXXX, \xNN and code-point escapes into readable Unicode text.

live · client-sideData, Radix & Stringfree · no sign-up

RAW INPUT

DECODED

Output appears here as you type — decoded on your device.

Input is processed on your device. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

What is the Unicode Escape Decoder?

A Unicode escape decoder converts textual escape sequences such as \u00e9 or \x41 into the actual characters they denote, reversing the escaping that programming languages apply to non-ASCII text.

When JSON, JavaScript, Java or Python serialise text that contains non-ASCII characters, they often escape them so the output stays pure ASCII. The common forms are \uXXXX (a 16-bit UTF-16 code unit), \xNN (a single byte) and \u{1F600} (a full code point, ES6 style). Characters above U+FFFF — emoji, most notably — are written as a surrogate pair of two \uXXXX escapes.

This decoder resolves all of those, correctly recombining surrogate pairs so \ud83d\ude00 becomes 😀 rather than two broken glyphs. It is the fastest way to read a JSON blob or log line that came back as \u00e9\u00e0 instead of éà.

Unicode Escape Decoder at a glance

\uXXXX: One UTF-16 code unit (4 hex digits)
\xNN: One byte (2 hex digits)
\u{XXXXX}: Full code point, ES6 / Rust style
Surrogate pairs: Recombined automatically for emoji

How to use the Unicode Escape Decoder

1Paste the escaped string — with or without surrounding quotes.
2Escapes are resolved and surrogate pairs recombined into single characters.
3Read the restored text and copy it out.

When you would reach for it

Reading a JSON API response that escaped every accented character.
Debugging log output where user names came back as \u sequences.
Deobfuscating a JavaScript snippet that hides strings behind \x escapes.

Unicode Escape Decoder — frequently asked questions

Last reviewed 25 July 2026 · questions or corrections: contact@decoder.tools