Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> Vlad Romascanu wrote:
>> Is there any way of casting (reinterpreting) a varchar/text field
>> containing arbitrary backslashes to bytea without making an escaped
>> copy of the varchar/text first?
> Well, the '\\' is being converted to '\' because of the single-quotes,
> and then bytea is saying it doesn't know how to process \something. It
> sounds like you want bytea but don't want the ability to use backslash
> escapes to input the bytea values. I am unsure how to accomplish that.
A really dangerous way is
CREATE CAST (text AS bytea) WITHOUT FUNCTION;
It's dangerous because it assumes more than it ought to about the
internal representation of the two types ... but for a one-shot
conversion I think it'd be all right.
regards, tom lane