user sees \xxx but is thwarted from searching for them

[Dan Jacobson]

The user is given no easy way to search for those \333 binary things
that he sees on his screen.

"Deep in my file there is some binary character[s] that are messing up
my life.  I must page thru the whole file looking around for their
\xxx butts, as emacs won't just let me do C-s \, which would find them
right away, if what we see is what we search."  Istead, emacs probably
wants me to do things a complicated way, doing C-s C-q followed by the
exact character, which I don't know until I've seen it, or emacs
probably wants me to specify a range in a regular expression, which
would be "all the characters that still cause a \xxx on the screen
even when in when in some Chinese mode etc. that encompasses most of
them..."

Anyway, the user sees a \.  The user wants to hunt for a \.  The user
must have a Ph.D. to hunt for a \. 

Wait.  Do emacs -nw file, somehow paste the whole buffer into the
x-windows mouse cut and paster, or xclip, then paste the file into
another file and then search :-(

By the way, the \xxx's are still octal.  Isn't today a hexy world?
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780