Historically pg_dump has taken pains to dump ASCII control characters as backslash constructs, for instance \t for tab. I am thinking this is not such a great idea, and that it'd be more portable rather than less so if we got rid of that logic and just dumped tab as tab, etc. In particular, making this play nice with standard_conforming_strings seems unpleasant: we'll have to emit E'' strings which are certainly not portable, not even to older PG releases.
The only good argument I can see for the current behavior is that it makes the dump file somewhat more robust against whitespace-mashing filters like typical email programs. But I wouldn't count on a dump file to come through such a thing completely unscathed anyway. Thoughts? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match