When you use a wildcard DNS hostname, i.e. *.domain.com, the return

value is \052.domain.com. which needs to be cleaned up. There are a
few other octal values that need to be handled.  Boto faces the same
issue: https://github.com/boto/boto/pull/1216 with a suggested fix
from a gist: https://gist.github.com/meonkeys/4482362#file-route53octals-py-L13

Test code for a single record set along with tests to mirror the gist
were added.