How can I de-escape my strings at run time?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <:9W3JZ3 at ggpc2.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter
da Silva) wrote:
: I'm mildly surprised X3.159 doesn't include \e for escape, since they
: added \xNN \a and so on... was it considered?
In article <MEISSNER.90Jun3154100 at curley.osf.org>,
meissner at osf.org (Michael Meissner) wrote:
: It came up a few times.  The problem is that ANSI C is not mandated to
: require ASCII (or even ISO646).  EBCDIC is the classic counterpoint.

Er, EBCDIC _has_ an ESC character.
Are there any character sets C is known to be used with that haven't?
-- 
"A 7th class of programs, correct in every way, is believed to exist by a
few computer scientists.  However, no example could be found to include here."