Yes, languages really need some sort of "raw string" feature like Python (or make regex literals their own syntax like Perl does). That's the solution here, not using weird characters...
Fine enough. But I wonder why strings have to use the same delimiter. Imagine if you had a list delimiter `|` and the answer to nested lists was “ohh, use raw list syntax, just make `###||` when you are three levels deep or something”.
It is quite nice what `sed` does. A sed search-and-replace is typically shown as `s/foo/bar/`, but you can actually use any punctuation character to separate the parts. Whatever follows the "s" will be used for that statement, so you can write `s|foo|bar|` or `s:foo:bar:`, even mixing and matching in the same script to have `s|baz|quux|; s:xyzzy:blorp:` and it will all work.
On the third hand strings are of course a special case because you always have special characters and whatnot which makes raw strings useful. :) Not just doing `"` and stuff.