How can I make gdb print unprintable characters of a string in hex instead of octal while preserving the ascii characters in ascii form?

Question

Suppose I have a buffer buf whose c string representation is

 char* buf = \"Hello World \\x1c\"

When I print this buf in gdb using

Answer 1

For anyone else who shares the irritation with octal escape-sequences in GDB, it's easy to fix (if you're prepared to build GDB yourself): in gdb/valprint.c, find the comment:

/* If the value fits in 3 octal digits, print it that
                     way.  Otherwise, print it as a hex escape.  */

and comment out the following 4 lines - all escape-sequences will then be printed as hex.