The parser recognizes \" as an escape. PC Card uses this. If devd's parser is broken, then we need to fix it.

See above.

Which PC-Card parser, one in pccardd? devd's parser (which is the only one I'm aware of for these strings) is:

bool
config::chop_var(char *&buffer, char *&lhs, char *&rhs) const
{
   ...
        walker++;               // skip =
        if (*walker == '"') {
                walker++;       // skip "
                rhs = walker;
                while (*walker && *walker != '"')
                        walker++;
                if (*walker != '"')
                        return (false);
                rhs[-2] = '\0';
                *walker++ = '\0';

Once that sees the first '"' in the value it just eats everything up to the second '"'. It does not check if the '"' was preceded by a '\'.

Then I need to fix that. The PC Card bus code currently quotes the " with \ when it encounters them.

Ah, I see. All the more reason to have some methods in libdevinfo to parse these out perhaps. :) (By which I mean methods that accept the string as input and return an nvlist as output. devd could map the nvlist into the vector it uses, or it could just use the nvlist directly perhaps)

Hmm, devctl_safe_quote() also needs to escape any '\' characters. Otherwise you can't have a '\' at the end of a value.