Javascript - How to show escape characters in a string?

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.

You have to escape the backslash, so try this:

str = "Hello\\nWorld";

Here are more escaped characters in Javascript.

JavaScript uses the \ (backslash) as an escape characters for:

• \' single quote
• \" double quote
• \ backslash
• \n new line
• \r carriage return
• \t tab
• \b backspace
• \f form feed
• \v vertical tab (IE < 9 treats '\v' as 'v' instead of a vertical tab ('\x0B'). If cross-browser compatibility is a concern, use \x0B instead of \v.)
• \0 null character (U+0000 NULL) (only if the next character is not a decimal digit; else it’s an octal escape sequence)

Note that the \v and \0 escapes are not allowed in JSON strings.