It would help to give a use case. Thanks.

You can do this already with strings.Trim like this:

s = strings.Trim(strconv.QuoteToASCII(s), `"`)

Try this playground example: https://play.golang.org/p/l-LKg504RDu

My immediate use case is that I have a daemon that uploads log files in batches. It assigns each batch a human-readable source identifier (derived from the source file name). For ease of debugging and sysadmin tasks, it's helpful for the identifiers to be visible and readable in two contexts: a downstream processing system, and temporary on-disk spooling.

Escaping the string lets the program preserve identifier readability, while using them for filenames and downstream primary keys. The proposed API change would let me define a function that decides which runes need escaping. (The current solution hex-encodes the identifiers instead.)

You can do this already with strings.Trim like this:

s = strings.Trim(strconv.QuoteToASCII(s), `"`)

It's not quite as simple as this. This doesn't work for strings ending in quotes, e.g. `"`.

@ccbrown Ah, good catch. Still this should work without any new API:

s = strconv.QuoteToASCII(s)
s = s[1:len(s)-1]

There's already a lot of API around quoting. Given that the existing API must stay, it does not seem particularly compelling to add new API to avoid @tmthrgd's suggestion of just slicing off the quotes.

Does this come up often enough, in a large enough variety of programs, to merit being in the standard library?

Given the lack of a compelling use case and how easy it is to write two lines of code instead, this seems like a likely decline.

Leaving open for a week for final comments.