How to unescape a Java string literal in Java?

Question

I\'m processing some Java source code using Java. I\'m extracting the string literals and feeding them to a function taking a String. The problem is that I need to pass the

Answer 1

org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils from commons-lang3 is marked deprecated now. You can use org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils#unescapeJava(String) instead. It requires an additional Maven dependency:

        
            org.apache.commons
            commons-text
            1.4
        

and seems to handle some more special cases, it e.g. unescapes:

• escaped backslashes, single and double quotes
• escaped octal and unicode values
• \\b, \\n, \\t, \\f, \\r