Yep, the only advantage I see with using ASCII control characters is that you can save a few bytes depending on the content. To make this approach robust, escaping is still needed.

If anything, PHP is the new Java with its AbstractSingletonBullshitFactories, or some just can't resist the urge to write it that way.

No, that's what caches are for.

Can confirm, fritz.box only gets suffixed for names on the local network, which my Fritzbox 7490 is the authoritative name server for.