bytea and character encoding when inserting escaped literals

Hi,

I've searched the archives a fair amount on this topic, but have not
found quite the answer / explanation I'm looking for. I attribute this
to my eternal confusion over character encoding issues in all
environments, so I apologize in advance for what might be a stupid
question. :)

I'mm running Postgresql 8.3.1 on WinXP. I have a UTF8 database into
which I'm trying to execute a series of INSERT INTO DDL statements. One
of the columns in the table I'm inserting into is a BYTEA column,
intended to hold the bytes that are the representation of a (small)
image.[1]

I had thought -- apparently erroneously -- that because this is not a
text based column, that I could send any string of bytes (octets) via my
INSERT statement to populate values in this column. I'm using escaped
string literals with hexadecimal representation so my INSERTs look
something like:

INSERT INTO myTable VALUES (..., E'\x15\x1C\x2F\x00\x02...', ...) ;

As you might be able to guess, I'm getting the error:

ERROR: Invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00

(I get the error whether I attempt this via JDBC or via the command-line
client with client encoding set to UTF8 or WIN1252.)

Again, I was surprised by this error since I thought from the
documentation at [2] that the server would only expect to be dealing in
a sequence of octets here, without any character-encoding constraints
implied by the DB's encoding.

What is the actual cause of this error, and how do I workaround it? Do I
need to pretend that my data is Unicode character data and specify the
UTF8 octets for that character data in my E'...' literal?

thanks in advance for any help!

Lee

PS [3]

[1] Actually, this DDL has been converted from that for a different DB
that uses LONGVARBINARY for this. BYTEA was my best guess for the
Postgresql equivalent.

[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype-binary.html

[3] I also was confused as to why 0x00 would be an invalid UTF8 byte
sequence. On its own, as I understand it, 0x00 is a fine UTF8 byte
sequence (representing Unicode codepoint 0). And when I (from the
command line) try to insert other invalid UTF8 sequences -- such as
INSERT INTO foo VALUES (E'\xC0\x80') I get an error that mentions the
full byte sequence as invalid: "invalid byte sequence for encoding
"UTF8": 0xc080". So this further confuses me. :-)