bash printf %q weirdness and UTF-8

I'm trying to get nice escaped strings via bash. The script works fine so long as there aren't high ASCII (UTF-8) characters. Code: #!/bin/bash KKK="…hkjh'" echo ${KKK} printf "%b\n" "${KKK}" printf -v GGG "%q" "${KKK}" printf "%b\n" "${GGG}" and what I get is Code: …hkjh' …hkjh' $'…hkjh\'' which is not what I was expecting (the leading $ and single quote wrappers). My shell is LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and it seems to handle the display of UTF-8 fine. The … is UTF code pt +2026 or 0xE280A6.

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