I just checked, and I am already escaping ascii 0 to ascii 31... and can therefore not reproduce your problem. Could you provide a short test case for me please? (Including all settings that you make?)

OK, I had a try at reproducing it, and you're right in that I can't get it to happen with the local vars display, however, it does happen with var_dump, so I guess I must have been confused - sorry about that. This example causes a nice exploding terminal for me:

<?php
class z {
public $zz;
}
$zx = new z;
$zx->zz = file_get_contents('image.png');
var_dump($zx);
?>

I don't know if this behaviour is intended or not, but I can't think of any circumstances I'd want it.

When html_errors is turned off Xdebug will use PHP's internal var_dump function. This function exhibits this problem and your issue can be reproduced even when Xdebug is not loaded. I agree that this should be addressed, but it should be addressed in PHP itself.