Re: special characters in filenames in error messages

[Karl Berry]

    pb> I think for \n too. 

I don't see why \n should be special?

    > - use \a \b \f \n \r \t \v for ASCII 7-8-12-10-13-9-11
    > - use \" \\ for " and \

The simplicity and regularity of having one and only one quoting
mechanism seems appealing to me.

Filenames containing any of these characters are rare.  I don't see that
"human readable" vs. "machine readable" is much an issue here -- that
is, I'd say "easily machine readable" is more important.

    > - use \x[0-9a-f][0-9a-f] for ASCII 0-6, 14-31 and 127

Using octal vs. hex is a different question.  We could do either one
(but not both).  I don't have a strong opinion about it.

    rw> then you could think about escaping ':', too:

Agreed, we should recommend escaping : also.

Thanks,
Karl