Where can I find a list of escape characters required for my JSON ajax return type?

Take a look at http://json.org/. It claims a bit different list of escaped characters than Chris proposed.

\"\\\/\b\f\n\r\t\u four-hex-digits

Here is a list of special characters that you can escape when creating a string literal for JSON:

\b  Backspace (ASCII code 08)\f  Form feed (ASCII code 0C)\n  New line\r  Carriage return\t  Tab\v  Vertical tab\'  Apostrophe or single quote\"  Double quote\\  Backslash character

Reference: String literals

Some of these are more optional than others. For instance, your string should be perfectly valid whether you escape the tab character or leave in a tab literal. You should certainly be handling the backslash and quote characters, though.

As explained in the section 9 of the official ECMA specification (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-404.pdf) in JSON, the following chars have to be escaped:

• U+0022 (", the quotation mark)
• U+005C (\, the backslash or reverse solidus)
• U+0000 to U+001F (the ASCII control characters)

In addition, in order to safely embed JSON in HTML, the following chars have to be also escaped:

• U+002F (/)
• U+0027 (')
• U+003C (<)
• U+003E (>)
• U+0026 (&)
• U+0085 (Next Line)
• U+2028 (Line Separator)
• U+2029 (Paragraph Separator)

Some of the above characters can be escaped with the following short escape sequences defined in the standard:

• \" represents the quotation mark character (U+0022).
• \\ represents the reverse solidus character (U+005C).
• \/ represents the solidus character (U+002F).
• \b represents the backspace character (U+0008).
• \f represents the form feed character (U+000C).
• \n represents the line feed character (U+000A).
• \r represents the carriage return character (U+000D).
• \t represents the character tabulation character (U+0009).

The other characters which need to be escaped will use the \uXXXX notation, that is \u followed by the four hexadecimal digits that encode the code point.

The \uXXXX can be also used instead of the short escape sequence, or to optionally escape any other character from the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).