Q:

Normal characters next to ASCII escapes in C strings

I'm writing a C program for a specific non-standard platform, and I need to print out a string which contains extended ASCII codes to draw a text-based UI. However, I've been needing to print out strings like the ones below:
"\xCDBaby  \xCD"

and
"\xDFEDWARD\xDF"

The goal being to print out the words "Baby" and "EDWARD" with the extended ASCII bytes on each end of them. Unfortunately, the C compiler interprets these as multibytes character escapes, since it treats the B and a in "Baby" and the E and D in "EDWARD" as hex digits that specify a multibyte character value, instead of a single byte character escape followed by normal text. Is there a way to separate the escape from the real character, such as a non-valued escape to mark the end of the hex number? Right now my workaround is to insert a "%c" and use the platform's printf formatting to put the right value there, but it's hacky and there must be a better way.
Using external libraries is out of the question, unless they can run freestanding, due to the platform I'm using (no standard library, not even printf), and the situation requires that I MUST use these Extended ASCII bytes. Really, there should be some way to represent this inside the string shouldn't there? Surely I'm not the first person to want to put escapes directly next to capital letters A and B. 

A:

C has a feature that causes adjacent string literals to be concatenated into a single string.
For example the three separate string literals "hello" " " "world" becomes the single string "hello world".
This is useful in cases like your because handling escape sequences in string literals is done before the concatenation. So you could solve your problem by using multiple string literals, like
"\xCD" "Baby  \xCD"

or
"\xDF" "EDWARD\xDF"

For more information about the different translation phases see e.g. this reference. The two phases that are important for this case are phase 5 which handles escape sequences, and phase 6 which does the concatenation.

