-/* Copy SOURCE to DEST, escaping non-printable characters. If FOR_URI
- is 0, they are escaped as \ooo; otherwise, they are escaped as
- %xx.
+/* Copy SOURCE to DEST, escaping non-printable characters.
+
+ Non-printable refers to anything outside the non-control ASCII
+ range (32-126) which means that, for example, CR, LF, and TAB are
+ considered non-printable along with ESC, BS, and other control
+ chars. This is by design: it makes sure that messages from remote
+ servers cannot be easily used to deceive the users by mimicking
+ Wget's output. Disallowing non-ASCII characters is another
+ necessary security measure, which makes sure that remote servers
+ cannot garble the screen or guess the local charset and perform
+ homographic attacks.
+
+ Of course, the above mandates that escnonprint only be used in
+ contexts expected to be ASCII, such as when printing host names,
+ URL components, HTTP headers, FTP server messages, and the like.
+
+ ESCAPE is the leading character of the escape sequence. BASE
+ should be the base of the escape sequence, and must be either 8 for
+ octal or 16 for hex.