Eimi Metamorphoumai,
Right you are. This is one of those confessions I need to make. It frustrates me when people respond to my post without having read it closely enough to see that their reply is not applicable and yet I have done the same thing here. I completely missed the part about a double backslash being a literal backslash. I was thinking that the only thing that could be escaped was the colon. Thanks for correcting me and reminding me the importance of reading carefully.