This definitely looks like a bug.
You should report it but in the meantime you can workaround it by omitting the escape character and doing your own escaping. The following example replaces "\:" with $; (char 032) before parsing and then converts it back:
#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;
use Text::CSV_XS;
my $row = '0005:A:A2:\\\\string 04\\\\';
# Translate escaped : "\:"
$row =~ s/\\:/$;/eg;
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({'quote_char' => '',
'escape_char' => '',
'sep_char' => ':',
'binary' => 1 });
if ($csv->parse($row)) {
my @fields = $csv->fields();
# Replace escaped chars
s/$;/\\:/g for @fields;
print "$fields[3]\n";
}
else {
print "Parse failed ", $csv->error_input();
}
--
John.