[MarkSweep]

The “usual escaping mechanism” may also refer to CommandLineToArgvW, a Windows API function that implements this. I think it is a pretty common way to implement the parsing side, though I’m not sure if the Visual C runtime does something different.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shellapi...

[MarkSweep]

Some more details on this, apparent CommandLineToArgvW implements a slightly different parsing algorithm that the Visual C++ runtime:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/main-function-comm...

Also, here is another implementation of this algorithm in C#, used in .NET:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/libraries/Sy...