Storing null bytes in bytea

Hi all,

I was going to post this on the pgsql-php list but I think the issue is
more on the PostgreSQL side of things.

I'm using PHP 5.2.9 connected to a PostgreSQL 8.3.7 server running on
Solaris 10 to try to store the session data for an application using a
custom session handler class. The session data (objects/class instances
etc) is serialized into raw bytes in PHP and contains a few nul/zero
bytes (which are meaningful to PHP when it comes to deserializing the data.)

Because of the nul bytes, I've set the session_data column to be a bytea
column in my database table. However I cannot get PostgreSQL to read
past the first nul byte on an insert, so the unserialize call fails when
it reads it back out the database and the remaining data is omitted.

An example of such query is this:

INSERT INTO system.session (user_id, session_key, session_name,
client_browser, date_created, date_expires, ip_address, session_data)
VALUES (NULL, '4pc4sjciahoc4fuk1bt4kohe91'::character varying(32),
'AppName'::character varying(50), 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.9) Gecko/2009040821 Firefox/3.0.9 (.NET CLR
3.5.30729)'::character varying(200),
public.get_pg_timestamp(1240853862::integer),
public.get_pg_timestamp(1240854162::integer), '192.168.0.8'::inet,
E'IsLoggedIn|b:1;CurrentUser|O:17:"Class_SystemUser":4:{s:26:"\\000Class_SystemUser}'::bytea);

All other columns are fine, but when it comes to the session_data
column, all I end up with is
'IsLoggedIn|b:1;CurrentUser|O:17:"Class_SystemUser":4:{s:26:"'.
Everything past the first "\\0000" byte sequence is ignored.

I've tried this with and without the 'E' at the beginning of the value
string.

Any pointers as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,
Andy