How do I print escape characters in Java?

Question

When I have a string such as:

String x = "hello\nworld"; 

How do I get Java to print the actual escape character (and not interpret it as an escape character) when using System.out?

For example, when calling

System.out.print(x); 

I would like to see:

hello\nworld 

And not:

hello world 

I would like to see the actual escape characters for debugging purposes.

Answer 1

Use the method "StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava" in Java lib "org.apache.commons.lang"

String x = "hello\nworld"; System.out.print(StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava(x)); 

Answer 2

One way to do this is:

public static String unEscapeString(String s){     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();     for (int i=0; i<s.length(); i++)         switch (s.charAt(i)){             case '\n': sb.append("\\n"); break;             case '\t': sb.append("\\t"); break;             // ... rest of escape characters             default: sb.append(s.charAt(i));         }     return sb.toString(); } 

and you run System.out.print(unEscapeString(x)).