I'm a newbie on PHP, so what I describe here may NOT be a bug. 

I understand that any character between a paif of single quotes does not get 'escaped'.

So I thought the follow small program will print
abc\
to the output screen (I'm using the so-named php-cli).

<?
$s = 'abc\';

print $s;
?>

Yet, I get the following message:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected $end in X:\dir\tes
t.php on line 6

But the following code runs just fine. It prints out
abc\088
That's exactly what I mean to do.

<?
$s = 'abc\088';

print $s;
?>

So my conclusion is that the engine has a little problem dealing with ending \ in a single-quoted string.