How should I escape strings in JSON?

Question

When creating JSON data manually, how should I escape string fields? Should I use something like Apache Commons Lang's StringEscapeUtilities.escapeHtml, StringEscapeUtilities.escapeXml, or should I use java.net.URLEncoder?

The problem is that when I use SEU.escapeHtml, it doesn't escape quotes and when I wrap the whole string in a pair of 's, a malformed JSON will be generated.

Answer 1

For those who came here looking for a command-line solution, like me, cURL's --data-urlencode works fine:

curl -G -v -s --data-urlencode 'query={"type" : "/music/artist"}' 'https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread'

sends

GET /freebase/v1/mqlread?query=%7B%22type%22%20%3A%20%22%2Fmusic%2Fartist%22%7D HTTP/1.1

, for example. Larger JSON data can be put in a file and you'd use the @ syntax to specify a file to slurp in the to-be-escaped data from. For example, if

$ cat 1.json 
{
  "type": "/music/artist",
  "name": "The Police",
  "album": []
}

you'd use

curl -G -v -s --data-urlencode [e-mail] 'https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread'

And now, this is also a tutorial on how to query Freebase from the command line :-)

Answer 2

The methods here that show the actual implementation are all faulty.
I don't have Java code, but just for the record, you could easily convert this C#-code:

Courtesy of the mono-project @ https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/master/mcs/class/System.Web/System.Web/HttpUtility.cs

public static string JavaScriptStringEncode(string value, bool addDoubleQuotes)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
        return addDoubleQuotes ? "\"\"" : string.Empty;

    int len = value.Length;
    bool needEncode = false;
    char c;
    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
    {
        c = value[i];

        if (c >= 0 && c <= 31 || c == 34 || c == 39 || c == 60 || c == 62 || c == 92)
        {
            needEncode = true;
            break;
        }
    }

    if (!needEncode)
        return addDoubleQuotes ? "\"" + value + "\"" : value;

    var sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    if (addDoubleQuotes)
        sb.Append('"');

    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
    {
        c = value[i];
        if (c >= 0 && c <= 7 || c == 11 || c >= 14 && c <= 31 || c == 39 || c == 60 || c == 62)
            sb.AppendFormat("\\u{0:x4}", (int)c);
        else switch ((int)c)
            {
                case 8:
                    sb.Append("\\b");
                    break;

                case 9:
                    sb.Append("\\t");
                    break;

                case 10:
                    sb.Append("\\n");
                    break;

                case 12:
                    sb.Append("\\f");
                    break;

                case 13:
                    sb.Append("\\r");
                    break;

                case 34:
                    sb.Append("\\\"");
                    break;

                case 92:
                    sb.Append("\\\\");
                    break;

                default:
                    sb.Append(c);
                    break;
            }
    }

    if (addDoubleQuotes)
        sb.Append('"');

    return sb.ToString();
}

This can be compacted into

    // https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/master/mcs/class/System.Json/System.Json/JsonValue.cs
public class SimpleJSON
{

    private static  bool NeedEscape(string src, int i)
    {
        char c = src[i];
        return c < 32 || c == '"' || c == '\\'
            // Broken lead surrogate
            || (c >= '\uD800' && c <= '\uDBFF' &&
                (i == src.Length - 1 || src[i + 1] < '\uDC00' || src[i + 1] > '\uDFFF'))
            // Broken tail surrogate
            || (c >= '\uDC00' && c <= '\uDFFF' &&
                (i == 0 || src[i - 1] < '\uD800' || src[i - 1] > '\uDBFF'))
            // To produce valid JavaScript
            || c == '\u2028' || c == '\u2029'
            // Escape "</" for <script> tags
            || (c == '/' && i > 0 && src[i - 1] == '<');
    }



    public static string EscapeString(string src)
    {
        System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

        int start = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++)
            if (NeedEscape(src, i))
            {
                sb.Append(src, start, i - start);
                switch (src[i])
                {
                    case '\b': sb.Append("\\b"); break;
                    case '\f': sb.Append("\\f"); break;
                    case '\n': sb.Append("\\n"); break;
                    case '\r': sb.Append("\\r"); break;
                    case '\t': sb.Append("\\t"); break;
                    case '\"': sb.Append("\\\""); break;
                    case '\\': sb.Append("\\\\"); break;
                    case '/': sb.Append("\\/"); break;
                    default:
                        sb.Append("\\u");
                        sb.Append(((int)src[i]).ToString("x04"));
                        break;
                }
                start = i + 1;
            }
        sb.Append(src, start, src.Length - start);
        return sb.ToString();
    }
}

Answer 3

I think the best answer in 2017 is to use the javax.json APIs. Use javax.json.JsonBuilderFactory to create your json objects, then write the objects out using javax.json.JsonWriterFactory. Very nice builder/writer combination.

Answer 4

Use EscapeUtils class in commons lang API.

EscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript("Your JSON string");

Answer 5

Not sure what you mean by "creating json manually", but you can use something like gson (http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/), and that would transform your HashMap, Array, String, etc, to a JSON value. I recommend going with a framework for this.

Answer 6

Apache commons-text now has a StringEscapeUtils.escapeJson(String).