How to escape commas, colons, and equals in tag names and values?

[mcandre]

How should statsd users escape tag elements that contain characters used for tag syntax?

Common strings that users may wish to include in tag names and/or values:

• localhost:80 (network address colon conflicts with InfluxDB and Datadog formats)
• 192.168.1.2,192.168.1.3,192.168.1.4 (comma conflicts with comma tag separator)
• YQ== (base64 trailing equals conflicts with InfluxDB format)
• #general (IRC channel name sharp conflicts with Datadog format)
• cat README.txt | less (pipe in command conflicts with statsd base format)

How should these characters be escaped? Should statsd users try to use the C escape convention, like localhost\:80 and YQ\=\=?

Could alexcesaro/statsd provide standard functions for escaping and unescaping strings that contain these special characters?

Could the statsd Go API automatically escape tag names and values on the user's behalf?