On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 10:30:56AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > It's possible that what you are looking for is a binary-equivalent > cast from text to bytea, which you could create like this: > # create cast (text as bytea) without function; Hm. No, actually it does not help. But playing around with the cast revealed to me another thing. If I double-encode "12345", I have: | # select encode('\x5c7833313332333333343335', 'escape'); | encode | --------------- | \\x3132333435 | (1 row) Now the intermediate result contains a '\\' which I just ignored as it is the usual quoting for a '\'. *But* of course this prevents the string from being correctly interpreted as a bytea-sequence, so the solution for the problem is: | # select encode(right(encode('\x5c7833313332333333343335', 'escape'), -1)::bytea, 'escape'); | encode | -------- | 12345 | (1 row) Kind of a hack, but this works on tables as well and will save me a lot of trouble. Thank you for the inspiration! Stefan