I am using Firefox's native JSON.parse() to parse some JSON strings that include regular expressions as values, for example: var test = JSON.parse('{"regex":"/\\d+/"}'); The '\d' in the above throws an exception with JSON.parse(), but works fine when I use eval (which is what I'm trying to avoid). What I want is to preserve the '\' in the regex - is there some other JSON-friendly way to escape it?