AsciiRow

The description of AsciiRow says that for each field it contains "the 
value of the field itself in ASCII characters".  The description is here:   
http://postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.3/postgres/protocol-message-formats.html

Looking at the bytes comming over the Frontend/Backend protocol, 
however,  it seems that the field is really always a String encoded 
according to the settings in the database - is that right?

Thanks.