[WildCard65]

Leaving this here for future people:
The problem was that C++ was applying an automatic escape delimiter to special characters: (ex: <back-slash>, <double quote>) before handing the string off to the calling code.

Example:
Text file: Hello user, "ALPHA", please provide input: \ERROR
Calling code receives: "Hello user, \"ALPHA\", please provide input: \\ERROR"

Note: Manually writing in escape sequences (ex: '\t', '\n') in a file is treated as 2 characters instead of a single character, this trips the automatic escape feature on the backslash.