\xxxxx characters are escaped

[joneff]

There have been numerous reports #79, #345, #485.

While I do agree that semantically \1234 and ሴ are the same, it still makes a difference when we see the former in the output. My main concern is that private chars, like \f000 or \f0f0 are impossible to distinguish from one another when encoded ( vs ). That makes debugging and troubleshooting much harder.

I do understand the reasoning behind encoding, but shouldn't there be an option to disable it somehow?

I am also OK with using ugly hacks like #{unquote('\\') + f0f0} as long as I know that at some point those will not cease to work.

[nex3]

Duplicate of #568