kotlin-java-escape provides small, dependency-light utilities for rendering strings and characters with Java-style escaping.

It is aimed at code generation, debugging, diagnostics, and any workflow where arbitrary text needs to be shown as a Java-friendly literal instead of raw terminal output.

commonMain.dependencies {
    implementation("one.wabbit:kotlin-java-escape:1.0.1")
}

import one.wabbit.formatting.escapeJavaString

val input = "Hello,\n\"world\" \\ snowman: \u2603"
val escaped = escapeJavaString(input, doubleQuoted = true)

check(escaped == "Hello,\\n\\\"world\\\" \\\\ snowman: \\u2603")

doubleQuoted controls which quote character gets escaped:

• true: escape "
• false: escape '

import one.wabbit.formatting.escapeJavaChar

check(escapeJavaChar('\n') == "\\n")
check(escapeJavaChar('\\') == "\\\\")
check(escapeJavaChar('\u2603') == "\\u2603")

escapeJavaChar also escapes [, ], and -, which makes it convenient for character-class style output and parser/debug tooling.

escapeJavaString can enforce an escaped-content budget before appending a truncation suffix:

import one.wabbit.formatting.escapeJavaString

val escaped = escapeJavaString("line1\nline2", doubleQuoted = true, limit = 6, limitEnding = "...")

check(escaped == "line1...")

That matters because a single input character may expand to multiple output characters such as \\n or \\u2603. The limitEnding suffix is appended after the budget is exhausted and is not counted against limit.

• escapeJavaString preserves letters, digits, and common ASCII punctuation
• escapeJavaString renders \n, \r, \t, \b, selected quotes, and backslashes with Java-style escapes
• non-ASCII letters and digits are preserved by escapeJavaString
• other non-ASCII characters in escapeJavaString become \uXXXX
• escapeJavaChar renders \t, \r, \n, and backslash with short escapes
• escapeJavaChar renders other ISO control characters, including backspace, as \xNN
• escapeJavaChar leaves quote characters unchanged

This library is small and stable in scope. It renders Java-style escaped fragments; it does not add surrounding quotes or parse escaped Java input back into text.

• User guide
• API reference notes
• Troubleshooting
• Development

Generated API docs can be built locally with Dokka. See API reference notes for the command.

• CHANGELOG.md

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) for open source use.

For commercial use, contact Wabbit Consulting Corporation at wabbit@wabbit.one.

Before contributions can be merged, contributors need to agree to the repository CLA.