Encountered a reversible "cat -v"? about cats

As far as I know, you cant.

cat -v mixes raw data and encoded one.

For example, what do you think the following will decode to?

^W

Will it be Control-W or literal ^W (carrot and W)? You can't actually know without a context from where this came from. Computers can't understand the context of a text.

cat -v is not meant to be machine-readable, it's meant to be human-readable.

[pete]

I should probably mention that I haven't seen something like this and I believe @jumps-are-op is correct.

You could probably do it in such a way that it usually works, by detecting sequences that could be reversed and sequences that -v would translate and the presence of the latter would indicate that it hadn't been -v'd yet. (On the other hand, the value is dubious.)