Re: bytea

That would be convenient but there are some difficulties. Say you have a
function that worked something like:
insert.....values (...., filetobytea("/home/me/myfile"),...);
It would be a nice ability to have but the server may not be on the same
machine (or even the same type/os/filesystem) as the client so sending a
pathname to the server is of little use. Such an ability must be handled by
the client which can read/translate the local file into the appropriate byte
sequence to send to the server.

I'm toying with a client program in C program that would include the ability
to take a file on the client machine and store it in a bytea field but
haven't come up with a good way to handle the necessary buffer space (ie. I
don't see any way to "stream" data to the server - it appears I need to
allocate sufficient buffer space for the entire file plus the entire escaped
version of the file before I can generate the query which causes me some
other problems.) Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Steve

On Wednesday 05 February 2003 2:25 am, Adrian Chong wrote:
> Hi Christoph,
>
> Thanks for your reply. But what I want to do is loading a file of a
> particular path with a sql statement in psql. Why I need to care about how
> the file looks like? Thanks.
>
> Adrian
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christoph Haller" <ch(at)rodos(dot)fzk(dot)de>
> To: <pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org>
> Cc: <achong(at)cecid(dot)hku(dot)hk>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 6:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [SQL] bytea
>
> > > I have a table containing a field of type bytea:
> > >
> > > CREATE TABLE a_table (
> > > a_field bytea
> > > );
> > >
> > > How can I import a file in a SQL script? What function I can use?
> >
> > The documentation says as in PostgreSQL 7.2.1 (I doubt this changed
> > significantly since)
> >
> > Octets of certain values must be escaped (but all octet values may be
> > escaped) when used as part of a string literal in an SQL
> > statement. In general, to escape an octet, it is converted into the
> > three-digit octal number equivalent of its decimal octet value, and
> > preceded by two backslashes.
> >
> > In general it goes like this
> > INSERT INTO a_table ( a_field ) VALUES ( '\\000\\001\\002\\003' ) ;
> > to load the first four ASCII characters.
> > You did not mention how your file looks like.
> > There is also a C function available called PQescapeBytea
> > which does all the required escaping to store memory areas in bytea
> > columns.
> > Refer to Command Execution Functions within libpq - C Library for
> > details.
> >
> > Regards, Christoph
> >
> >
> >
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