How can I de-escape my strings at run time?

[Henry Spencer]

In article <:9W3JZ3 at ggpc2.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I'm mildly surprised X3.159 doesn't include \e for escape, since they
>added \xNN \a and so on... was it considered?

Yes.  "Escape" is a character-set-specific concept, however, and it was
thought inappropriate to demand that it exist in all C implementations.
(Personally I'd view \a much the same way, but this is the official
explanation...)
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