JSON: why are forward slashes escaped?

Question

The reason for this \"escapes\" me.

JSON escapes the forward slash, so a hash {a: \"a/b/c\"} is serialized as {\"a\":\"a\\/b\\/c\"} instead

Answer 1

PHP escapes forward slashes by default which is probably why this appears so commonly. I'm not sure why, but possibly because embedding the string "" inside a