In general, the only safe solution would be to escape *all* byte values on output. Then the client can reconstruct the byte sequence based on the character entities in the delivered string and does not have to rely on the character codes staying the same during the conversion.
Seems like this brings us back to using hex for bytea, ala BLOB in SQL99. What would be the implications of changing byteain and byteaout to use X'FFFFFF' instead of '\377\377\377'?
I guess backward compatibility is a big problem. Maybe make it configurable: all octal escaped or all hex. Is it better to create a completely new datatype?
Joe
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