escapes is a wee library for PHP 5.3+ that lets you use escapes as barewords, like so:
echo 'hello, world', \n;
echo 'I', \t, 'love', \t, 'tabs!', \n;
echo 'In Europe, they use ', \xE2, \x82, \xAC, ' (the Euro)', \n;
Supports the e, f, n, r, t, v and xXX (hex digits case-insensitive) escapes.
Install it with composer, just require ajf/escapes.
If you actually use this... dear god the future isn't bright