question about output of files copied/deleted

[Don Cohen]

It seems to me that this output would be more useful if it
were possible to uniquely translate a line of output back into
a file path.
Right now that's not possible due to the control character encoding.
An output line like
asd\#002\#003zxc
could either mean a file of that name or
asd^B\#003zxc or asd^B^Czxc or asd\#002^Czxc

I was hoping to start with rsync -n, figure out what was
going to be replaced or deleted, archive those files, and
then use the list to do the rsync without the -n but not getting
files that had been updated since the original -n -- but this
ambiguity prevents that from working.

Is there some solution I'm missing?

Otherwise, what's wrong with not encoding the control characters on
output?  I see only one problem, which is that newline characters
would then make it ambiguous whether
asd
zxc
was actually one file or two.
Since there is one character that cannot appear in such a line of
output (for ext4 at least, which is ascii 0), you could replace
newlines with that.  Admittedly not portable...
Perhaps there could be an argument saying how to map file names?