Working with JSON is a daily task for many developers, but handling special characters incorrectly can lead to frustrating bugs. This is where JSON escape sequences come in—they allow you to safely include quotes, backslashes, and other characters in JSON strings. Despite their simplicity, mistakes often happen, especially when developers are not familiar with proper escaping rules.

One common error is failing to escape double quotes inside strings. For instance, writing {"message": "He said "hello""} will break your JSON parser. The correct approach is to use a backslash: {"message": "He said \"hello\""}. Similarly, backslashes themselves need escaping (\\) to prevent parsing errors.

Another frequent mistake involves newline characters. Developers sometimes include raw line breaks in JSON, which can lead to failed API requests or corrupted data. Using \n or \r\n ensures the JSON remains valid and portable across systems. Unicode characters also need proper escaping, especially for internationalized applications, to avoid encoding issues.

These errors aren’t just cosmetic—they can break entire workflows, from frontend rendering to API consumption. That’s why automated testing and validation are essential. Tools like Keploy can help by capturing real API traffic and automatically generating test cases, ensuring that your JSON handling—including escapes—is consistent and error-free.

Finally, always validate your JSON using linters or parsers before sending it over the network. By combining good practices, proper use of JSON escape, and automated testing with tools like Keploy, developers can minimize these common errors, improve system reliability, and save hours of debugging time.

Have you ever run into tricky JSON escape issues in your projects? Sharing real-world examples can help everyone avoid similar pitfalls.