escaping/unescaping Re: coding an Application in perl

Hi,

Per Operations:

  Property values will be in the same case they were in the
  configuration file, but will be escaped (e.g. the tab character
  replaced with \t, and so on, with \ being represented by \\)

is this done with a specific standard Perl function, or does Amanda
provide a Perl callable function (in Amanda::Utils maybe?) that is
specified to do the exact reverse transformation?

Thanks,
-Chap