Peter Gram <peter(dot)m(dot)gram(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I think it behaves as expected. Look at my select "select
> encode(charcol::bytea, 'hex') , intcol from z;" it returns 20 which is a
> space in hex
Yeah, the space is stored. What is probably surprising the OP
is that applying the || operator involves a coercion from "char"
to "text", which strips the defined-to-be-insignificant trailing
space(s) of the "char" value.
As David said, you're best off not using the char type.
The semantics around trailing spaces are too squishy for
my taste, and there's no real advantage compared to varchar
or text.
regards, tom lane