It would be presumptuous of me to answer your question, especially as my programming skills are just at hobby level, but I recognize that backslash in a single quoted string behaves differently before a ', so you effectively lose the closing quote. I do note that print '\'' . "\n"; prints "'" which would allow you to include a single quote inside a single quoted string much as you would use \" to include double quotes in a double quoted string.

As to my grasp of <'\x' and '\\x' produce the same string by using two different representations of the same character>, you're right!