How to escape metrics with colon in the name

I'm sending metrics which use colon char as a namespace hierarchical separator in their names. Since it is also the field separator for StatsD, I get DEBUG: Bad line: a in msg "foo:a:b:1|c" when debuging with echo "foo:a:b:1|c" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125. Tried escaping colons with preceding backslashes (\:) but same error. Is there any escape sequence? If not, would not it be desirable/acceptable as a feature request and/or patch? TIA.