In another forum someone noticed that certain characters, like Umlauts, on OS X are printed like (e.g.) "\334" and asked how to get back the real charcter ("Ü").

My solution to this was a small perl snippet: 

binmode STDOUT => ':utf8'; 
$_= shift; 
s/([\@\$%:])/\\$1/g; 
eval qq(print qq:$_:);

[download]

This seems to work fine as for example 
deescape '\334ber@n\374ber.com'

[download]
correctly prints "Über@nüber.com".

But you might have noted the disadvantage: I'm using an "eval" and so might fall for some code injection. I also needed to escape @, $, % and :. The later because I use it as the quote-character.

Currently I have no idea how I could safely get strings like this unescaped.

s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e

In reply to How can I safely unescape a string. by Skeeve

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