"Joe Conway" <joseph(dot)conway(at)home(dot)com> writes:
> ... is there a good reason that byteaout
> octal escapes all non-printable characters?
Well, AFAICS it *has to* escape nulls (zero bytes). Whether it escapes
more stuff is a matter of taste once you accept that.
What we really need to have to make bytea more useful is direct read and
write functions that don't require any escaping (a la large object
lo_read/lo_write).
regards, tom lane