Re: type cast from bytea to varchar or whatever

On Donnerstag 10 September 2009 Tom Lane wrote:
> There has *never* been a Postgres release that accepted bytea ILIKE
> something.  I'm not sure what you were really doing before, but that
> wasn't it.

You're right: That query was generated on a specific search, and doesn't
work. It's a bug that needs a fix.

I currently have no idea how to cast bytea to text. For this purpose of
searching through mails, it would be enough for postgres to treat the
bytea as text, and just search through it. You can only find ascii chars
then, but that's a limitation one can live with. The only other way
would be to retrieve the whole stuff and search within a C program, but
that would mean retrieving a lot of data from the DB that's not needed -
bad for performance. Is there no "override" to ignore bytea encoding and
search it ascii-like?

mfg zmi
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