Swift: how to suppress interpretation of special characters and provide string literal - ios

Question

The goal is to serialize a Swift object by converting it to a JSON object then converting the JSON object into a JSON string that can be passed over the wire and decoded on the other side.
The problem is producing a valid JSON string.
Newlines must be escaped in a JSON string, but Swift interprets special characters in the escaped string instead of treating the string as a literal.
For example:
let a = "foobar\nhello\nworld"
let escapedString = a.replacingOccurrences(of: "\n", with: "\\n")
print(escapedString)
What gets printed is foobar\nhello\nworld instead of the desired foobar\\nhello\\nworld.
How do you tell Swift to treat a string as a literal and not to interpret special characters within?
UPDATE
As OOPer points out, using debugPrint shows the \\n characters remaining intact.
However, when paired with evaluateJavaScript in WKWebView, the \\n characters are turned into \n, which is the root issue. For example:
let script = "\(callback)(\'\(escapedString)\')"
webView!.evaluateJavaScript(script) { (object: Any?, error: Error?) -> Void in
print("Done invoking \(callback)")
}

Answer 1

There is no unescaped string syntax like in javascript template literals which is probably what you are looking for; maybe they will add it in the future. Unfortunately you therefore have to escape each back slash which sometimes looks very scray, as in your example.
//This is the same as `foobar\nhello\nworld` where each char is a literal
let a = "foobar\\nhello\\nworld"
let escapedString = a.replacingOccurrences(of: "\\n", with: "\\\\n")
//This outputs `foobar\\nhello\\nworld`
print(escapedString)

Answer 2

Maybe you are just mistaking to interpret the output from print.
When you get foobar\nhello\nworld from print(escapedString), escapedString contains 20 characters -- f o o b a r \ n h e l l o \ n w o r l d.
This is a valid JSON string when enclosed between "s.
If you want to check the escaped result in String-literal-like notation, you can use debugPrint:
let a = "foobar\nhello\nworld"
let escapedString = a.replacingOccurrences(of: "\n", with: "\\n")
print(escapedString) //->foobar\nhello\nworld
debugPrint(escapedString) //->"foobar\\nhello\\nworld"
For UPDATE
When using with evaluateJavaScript, you'd better think what is the right code as JavaScript, if you want to represent a JSON escaped string in JavaScript, you would write in .js file (or in <script>...</script>):
someFunc('foobar\\nhello\\nworld');
So, you may need to write something like this:
let a = "foobar\nhello\nworld"
let escapedForJSON = a.replacingOccurrences(of: "\n", with: "\\n")
//In actual code, you may need a little more...
let escapedForJavaScriptString = escapedForJSON.replacingOccurrences(of: "\\", with: "\\\\")
let script = "\(callback)(\'\(escapedForJavaScriptString)\')"
webView!.evaluateJavaScript(script) { (object: Any?, error: Error?) -> Void in
print("Done invoking \(callback)")
}