Backslashes in bytea values

My company is using Postgres 8.3.8. We have some tables with bytea
columns that store file data such as the contents of PDF or RTF files.
The escape_string_warning parameter is on, and inserting this kind of
data causes the backslash warning to be generated, since the backslash
character appears in the raw data of these types of files. I have
updated much of our code to use the E'' syntax in order to suppress
these messages.

I am trying to figure out what the repercussions would be if I were to
turn on the standard_conforming_strings parameter. None of our code
actually uses a backslash to escape a double-quote, but I don't know how
this would affect the bytea values which I discussed above. How are
backslashes affected if they are actually part of the raw data?

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Thank you,

Lewis Kapell
Computer Operations
Seton Home Study School