Re: [PATCH] by request: base64 for bytea

> Alex Pilosov <alex(at)pilosoft(dot)com> writes:
> > Function to cast bytea as text, I think, should do proper checking that
> > input did not contain nulls, and return text data back.
>
> That is most definitely not good enough. In MULTIBYTE installations
> you'd have to also check that there were no illegal multibyte sequences.
>
> The whole approach seems misguided to me anyway. bytea isn't equivalent
> to text and conversion functions based on providing incomplete binary
> equivalence are fundamentally wrong. hex or base64 encode/decode
> functions seem like reasonable conversion paths, or you could provide
> a function that mimics the existing I/O conversions for bytea, ugly as
> they are.

He can create an output function just to text, and varchar, etc will work
OK, right?

I think the main issue is that char(), varchar(), text all input/output
strings of the same format while bytea has special backslash handling
for binary/null values.

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