转义字符串中的字符

Question

I have a string that contains escaped characters:

String myString = "I\\nam\\na\\nmultiline\\nstring\\twith\\ttabs";

I would like to convert the escaped characters so that it would output:

System.out.println(myConvertedString);

I
am
a
multiline
string    with    tabs

Is there any standard function (maybe Guava) that does this?

Answer 1

If you have received the exception from a stack trace, the only escaped characters are probably \\n and \\t , in which case:

String converted = input.replace("\\n", "\n").replace("\\t", "\t");

If there can be more than that I think you'll have to list all the possibilities.

Answer 2

StringEscapeUtils in the apache commons library has many methods that will escape, or unesecape a string as required.

StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava(someString);
StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(someOtherString);