Hello! To get straight to the point, here's my problem: mypgdb=# select bytea2text(decrypt(encrypt('Tübingen'::bytea, 'mypassphrase'::bytea,'bf'::text),'mypassphrase'::bytea,'bf'::text)) as foo; foo ----------------- T\303\274bingen (1 row) I have compiled and installed pg_crypto and I'am using the following function as workaround for a bytea-to-text-cast: create or replace function bytea2text(bytea) returns text as ' begin return $1; end; ' language plpgsql; The cluster was initialized with locale de_DE.UTF-8, pg_controldata confirms: LC_COLLATE: de_DE.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE: de_DE.UTF-8 Database version is PostgreSQL 8.0.1 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.2 I think I'm missing something very obvious here, so please give me a hint: How can I use pgcrypto to encrypt and decrypt text which contains UTF-8 special characters like german umlauts? I think that this simple bytea2text-function probably needs a replacement, but I haven't got the faintest clue about how to actually retrieve the original input after encryption. Any help would be tremendously appreciated :) Thanks in advance! Kind regards Markus ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings