kotlin-java-escape

Maven Central Kotlin Multiplatform

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.

🚀 Installation

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

🚀 Usage

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 '

Escape A Character

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.

Truncation

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.

Output Rules

  • 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

Status

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.

Documentation

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

Release Notes

Licensing

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.

Contributing

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