Does Guava provide a method to unescape a String?

I need to escape special characters in a

.

Guava provides the

Escaper

class, which does exactly this:

Escaper escaper = Escapers.builder()

        .addEscape('[', "\\[")

        .addEscape(']', "\\]")

        .build();



String escapedStr = escaper.escape("This is a [test]");



System.out.println(escapedStr);

// -> prints "This is a \[test\]"

Now that I have an escaped , I need to unescape it and I can't find anything in Guava to do this.

I was expecting to have a method, but it isn't the case.

Edit : I'm aware that unescaping can be tricky, even impossible in some non-sense cases.

For example, this usage can lead to ambiguities :

Escaper escaper = Escapers.builder()

        .addEscape('@', " at ")

        .addEscape('.', " dot ")

        .build();

Unless the escaped data contains only email addresses and nothing more, you can't safely get your data back by unescaping it.

A good example of a safe usage of the is HTML entities :

Escaper escaper = Escapers.builder()

        .addEscape('&', "&")

        .addEscape('<', "&lt;")

        .addEscape('>', "&gt;")

        .build();

Here, you can safely escape any text, incorporate it in a HTML page and unescape it at any time to display it, because you covered every possible ambiguities.

In conclusion, I don't see why unescaping is so controversial. I think it is the developper's responsability to use this class properly, knowing his data and avoiding ambiguities.
Escaping, by definition, means you will eventually need to unescape. Otherwise, it's obfuscation or some other concept.