\x indicates a hexadecimal character escape. It’s used to specify characters that aren’t typeable (like a null '\x00').
And "\xeb\x2a" is a literal string (type is char *, 3 bytes, null-terminated), and '\xeb\x2a' is a character constant (type is int, 2 bytes, not null-terminated, and is just another way to write 0xEB2A or 60202 or 0165452). Not the same 🙂