Florian Weimer <fweimer(at)bfk(dot)de> writes:
> The old 'escape' encoding used by PostgreSQL 8.4 and prior was pretty
> helpful for getting human-readable strings in psql. It seems this
> functionality was removed in PostgreSQL 9.0. Was this an accident or
> a deliberate decision? Could we get it back, please?
I think you're looking for "set bytea_output = escape".
regards, tom lane