'\' re-visited

Reading the SQL92 syntax definition is enough to make ones eyes water,
however I found no declaration for usage of the '\' character. I also can
find no reference of it's proper usage in any of the Postgres docs (I may
have missed it). So, for those of us requiring pure string data in
selects/updates/inserts, could someone give an accurate reference of how
Postgres interprets a backslash? Also (Byron), would it be reasonable
(please) to have a driver setting in the odbc setup to turn off the
'escaping' feature of backslashing so that an application does not need to
be that intimate with the backend?

Cheers!

Ken