Shouldn't JSON.stringify escape Unicode characters?

The JSON spec does not demand the conversion from unicode characters to escape-sequences. "Any UNICODE character except " or \ or control character." is defined to be a valid JSON-serialized string:

json string format


The short answer for your question is NO; JSON.stringify shouldn't escape your string.

Although, handling utf8 strings can seem strange if you save your HTML file with utf-8 encoding but don't declare it to be an utf8 file.

For example:

<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title></title>
        <script>
            var data="árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP";
            alert(JSON.stringify(data));
        </script>
    </head>
</html>

This would alert "árvíztűrÅ‘ tükörfúrógép ÃRVÃZTÅ°RÅ TÃœKÖRFÚRÓGÉP".

But if you add the following line to the header:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Then, the alert will be what one could expect: "árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP".


No. The preferred encoding for JSON is UTF-8, so those characters do not need to be escaped.

You are allowed to escape unicode characters if you want to be safer or explicitly send the JSON in a different encoding (that is, pure ASCII), but it is against recommendations.

Tags:

Javascript

Unicode

Json

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