Olivier Jeannet <jeannet@montrouge.tt.slb.com> writes:
> Is this normal ?
> Am I supposed to get binary values as escaped ASCII,
Yes. Otherwise you'd have big trouble with, for example, \000.
You can use a binary cursor to read out unconverted data, but that might
be more trouble than it's worth.
There has been talk of designing some access functions similar to the
large-object functionality (lo_read/lo_write, etc) for bytea values.
That would bypass this issue and also allow reading/writing large
values in sections, which'd be awfully nice. Not done yet though.
regards, tom lane