Thank you for your reply, and for the explanation. I'll try and explain my use case.
I have a remote server used as a file downloader. I then later on want to copy files from the remote server to a directory on my local computer, using a modified version of your most excellent Archivesync v1.3 script. I leave a copy of the original file behind on the remote server until I'm ready to delete it. I will move files out of the directory on my local computer and I figured I would use rclone lsf to make a file with a list of the files I have already copied from the remote server, so they won't be copied again. Sometimes the file names and directory names on the remote server will contain special characters as noted in my original post. I'd like to escape those characters so that rclone understands. Does that make sense?