Re: BYTEA

Jeff!

Friday, September 20, 2002, 1:24:28 PM, You wrote:

JD> I don't really see a way postgres could do it any better, since the queries
JD> and results are both strings, so there have to be rules about what a string
JD> might include. Base64 works nicely because it's fairly compact, and all
JD> "safe" text.

Hm.. If i have a varchar field then if I want to insert a string
some'tex\t into it, I quote it like that: 'some\'tex\\t' .. but if I
want to insert the same into bytea field I must quote it more:
'some\\'tex\\\\' .. why ???

JD> On Friday 20 September 2002 12:57 am, Timur V. Irmatov wrote:
>> Hi, people!
>>
>> I've used PostgreSQL for few months and it fully satisfies my needs.
>>
>> Now I'm starting to explore BYTEA type (for storing small 1-5 Kb png
>> images) and found it very cumbersome.
>>
>> I'd like to hear background explanation of why strings used as bytea
>> literals pass two phases of parsing? it seems very odd to me to escape
>> backslash two times (like that: '\\\\' ) just to insert it into
>> string.. It adds more complexity to apps, forcing it encode/decode
>> those literals..
>>
>> I think it would be enough to quote it like any other string, just for
>> parser to understand it correctly, and insert into table. Bytea is
>> binary data by it's nature, why to quote it when I perform selects?
>> I'm not going to show it to humans, it is just data for my
>> application.
>>
>> And if bytea really is displayed to a human then translating value into
>> readable form (quote non-printable characters etc.) is a task of the
>> application (psql, my app ..) but not PostgreSQL backend's.
>>
>> Any comments?
>>
>> Timur.
>>
>>
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Sincerely Yours,
Timur
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