Sounds to me as though you're making the classic error of thinking that  
the string the debugger shows you is character-for-character what's  
actually in the string.

The debugger shows you a string that has stuff like that escaped.  But the  
string itself doesn't actually literally contain a backslash followed by a  
quote or another backslash or whatever.  It just has the escaped character  
itself (the quote, backslash, etc.)

In other words, you don't need to do anything special to get the verbatim  
text.  Read the text into a string from a file, and the string will have  
precisely the same text in it that the file has (or as near as is  
possible, given any encoding conversion that might have  
happened...normally there wouldn't be any limitations here though).

Pete