Javascript - How to show escape characters in a string? [duplicate]

Question

Very simple question, but for some reason I can't find the answer anywhere after 10 minutes of Googling. How can I show escape characters when printing in Javascript?

Example:

str = "Hello\nWorld"; console.log(str); 

Gives:

Hello World 

When I want it to give:

Hello\nWorld 

Answer 1

If your goal is to have

str = "Hello\nWorld"; 

and output what it contains in string literal form, you can use JSON.stringify:

console.log(JSON.stringify(str)); // ""Hello\nWorld"" 

const str = "Hello\nWorld"; const json = JSON.stringify(str); console.log(json); // ""Hello\nWorld"" for (let i = 0; i < json.length; ++i) {     console.log(`${i}: ${json.charAt(i)} (0x${json.charCodeAt(i).toString(16).toUpperCase().padStart(4, "0")})`); }

.as-console-wrapper {     max-height: 100% !important; }

console.log adds the outer quotes (at least in Chrome's implementation), but the content within them is a string literal (yes, that's somewhat confusing).

JSON.stringify takes what you give it (in this case, a string) and returns a string containing valid JSON for that value. So for the above, it returns an opening quote ("), the word Hello, a backslash (\), the letter n, the word World, and the closing quote ("). The linefeed in the string is escaped in the output as a \ and an n because that's how you encode a linefeed in JSON. Other escape sequences are similarly encoded.