I have a column declared as array of text. I can get a single backslash into one of the array elements by update ... set mycol[1] = E'blah \\here' If I try to update the whole array update ... set mycol = E'{"blah \\here"}' the backslash is missing. I can get two backslashes there. Is there a good way to solve the problem, other than rewriting my update script to do array updates one element at a time?