Hi Markus, I should have said "The ICT department doesn't give me access to the psql command line interface". Thanks for explaining what goes wrong. I now understand the problem. It doesn't solve it though. I haven't tried your first suggestion since ASCII won't be good enough. I also need to be able to do something like charset := charset || '\xC2\xA9'; but then in the dynamic form like charset := charset || '\xC2\x' || to_hex(i)'; So I thought your second suggestion might be of help. I get an error though: ERROR: operator does not exist: character varying || bytea HINT: No operator matches the given name and argument type(s). You may need to add explicit type casts. CONTEXT: SQL statement "SELECT $1 || decode(to_hex( $2 ), 'hex')"
>>> Markus Schaber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2006-11-27 16:16 >>> Hi, Bart, Bart Degryse wrote: > I suppose your statement > test=# select '\x'||'65'; > is done on some command line interface. I don't have that. I can only > use some client program. All versions of PostgreSQL I know are shipped with "psql" as command line interface. (It's a client program, actually. :-) > I'm using EMS SQL Manager 2007 and pgAdmin III 1.3 > None of them accepts your statement. I just tried with pgAdmin III 1.4.3, and it worked fine. > When I try to do the same for a range of hex values ( FOR i IN 101..101 > LOOP charset := charset || '\x' || to_hex(i); ) it is not longer a > bunch of hex values that get stored but a series of varchars. The problem is that the \x escaping is done in the parser, so in your first function, the query engine actually sees "charset := charset || 'e';" In the second function, the '\x' string is parsed as is, and converted to the String 'x' instead of being rejected as broken \x sequence, I think for compatibility reasons. Then, the engine sees: "charset := charset || 'x' || to_hex(i);" Maybe you can change it to (ASCII version): "charset := charset || chr(i);" or (256-bit version): "charset := charset || decode(to_hex(i),'hex'); HTH, Markus -- Markus Schaber | Logical Tracking&Tracing International AG Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS Fight against software patents in Europe! www.ffii.org www.nosoftwarepatents.org