Hello, I can SELECT && print a column in hex with: pos71=# select d02name::bytea from d02ben where d02bnr = '00001048313' ; ... \x50c3a46461676f67697363686520486f6368736368756c65205765696e67617274656e2020 ... but when I use the same in Perl DBI::Pg with: ... $sth=$dbh->prepare( "select d02name::bytea from d02ben where d02bnr = '00001048313'"); $sth->execute or die "exec error\n".${DBI::errstr}."\n"; while ( (@row = $sth->fetchrow_array) ) { print "$row[0]\n"; } It prints the UTF-8 string and not the hex string: ./utf8-01.pl DBI is version 1.642, DBD::Pg is version 3.8.0 client_encoding=UTF8, server_encoding=UTF8 Pädagogische Hochschule Weingarten I checked with strace that the PG server delivers to DBI:Pg the hex string, so it must be converted somewhere (or in print ...) again to UTF-8. See below. Any ideas? matthias recvfrom(3, "T\0\0\0 \0\1d02name\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\21\377\377\377\377\377\377\0\0D\0\0\0\376\0\1\0\0\0\364\\x50c3a46461676f67697363686520486f6368736368756c65205765696e67617274656e2020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020202020C\0\0\0\rSELECT 1\0Z\0\0\0\5I", 16384, 0, NULL, NULL) = 308 write(1, "P\303\244dagogische Hochschule Weingarten -- Matthias Apitz, ✉ guru@xxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.unixarea.de/ +49-176-38902045 Public GnuPG key: http://www.unixarea.de/key.pub May, 9: Спаси́бо освободители! Thank you very much, Russian liberators!