Unicode in a map name

[Sharlikran]

["bleakrock/bleakrockvillage_base"] = {"Bleakrock Village", "Ödfels^N,in", "\xd6dfels^N,auf", "\xEF\xBF\xBDdfels^N,auf", "village de Morneroc^md",},

I have some map names with escape sequences in them. One is a BOM sequence.

function Harvest.GetNewMapName(mapName)
    local result = nil
    for newMapName, translations in pairs(Harvest.mapSystem) do
        if Harvest.contains(translations, mapName) then
            if result then
                return nil --there are more than one possible maps, skip to prevent wrong data
            else
                result = newMapName
            end
        end
    end
    return result
end

That function is used to look for possible results. It will find "Ödfels^N,in" but not "\xd6dfels^N,auf" and "\xEF\xBF\xBDdfels^N,auf" because I think the string is being treated as a literal match, not as a unicode string.

function Utf8to32(utf8str)
    assert(type(utf8str) == "string")
    local res, seq, val = {}, 0, nil
    for i = 1, #utf8str do
        local c = string.byte(utf8str, i)
        if seq == 0 then
            table.insert(res, val)
            seq = c < 0x80 and 1 or c < 0xE0 and 2 or c < 0xF0 and 3 or
                  c < 0xF8 and 4 or --c < 0xFC and 5 or c < 0xFE and 6 or
                  error("invalid UTF-8 character sequence")
            val = bit32.band(c, 2^(8-seq) - 1)
        else
            val = bit32.bor(bit32.lshift(val, 6), bit32.band(c, 0x3F))
        end
        seq = seq - 1
    end
    table.insert(res, val)
    table.insert(res, 0)
    return res
end

I googled that but i'm not really trying to check for valid UTF-8 chars, and amke sure there aren't any errors. What I am wondering is what simple command do I use to take a string like "\xEF\xBF\xBDdfels^N,auf" and match it with "�dfels^N,auf". Where "�" is the BOM sequence.

When "\xEF\xBF\xBDdfels^N,auf" == "�dfels^N,auf" then then the result would be true.

string.escape(string1, string2)

Is there something like above where string1 = "\xEF\xBF\xBDdfels^N,auf" and string2 = "�dfels^N,auf" so then it's true?