Potential pitfalls in DNS handling

That doesn't stop people writing code like:

labels = result.split('.')
shorthost = labels[0]

If you split on '.', then you break when presented with the escaped form '\.' as you'll do an extra split. You might get away with it when only looking for the TLD, or just sorting data and rejoining the strings.

So, there's an escaping mechanism, it helps a lot of the time, but other times it produces surprising results and you need to at least know that the escaping mechanism is in use.