GNU grep and files with nulls

So, I have a file that contains a line like:

    foo.bar.bletch.one.two

where the dots represent null (\0) characters.

I want to be able to grep this line, using this command:

    grep foo.bar.bletch.one.two file

where the dots represent actual dots (regexp wildcards).
(I do it this way because I don't know how to represent a null character in
a grep RE; using dots instead gets you a "good enough for government work"
result)

Interestingly, in grep version 2.20, this worked as expected, but in grep
version 3.3, it fails.  I found this out when the above code stopped
working, when the code was moved to a newer Linux system (which had the new
version of grep installed).

This is all out of curiosity, of course.  I know this is a grey area in
terms of standards and stuff like that, but it seems odd that they would
actually removing working functionality.  The man page says little on the
subject; it does mention nulls in a few places, but it seems not relevant
to this issue.

Anyway, I switched the code to use GNU AWK (Gawk), which explicitly
supports nulls in strings, so no worries there.  The Gawk solution is shorter
and cleaner anyway.

--
 "They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, you hear satanic messages.
  Thats nothing, cause if you play it forwards, it installs Windows."