Hello! The database cluster is initialized to use UNICODE. The client encoding is set to BIG5. The middleware escapes the backslash in the following string before writing to TEXT/VARCHAR column in server: a5 5c af e0 This is a string comprises Big5 characters each of 2 octets big. Note that the second octets, 5c, of the first Big5 character clashes backslash '\'. Thus, this string is escaped to a5 5c 31 33 34 af e0 and is inserted to backend something like this: INSERT INTO x VALUES ('y\134na'); Where octets 'y' and character "na" are unprintable characters here in terms of ASCII. Problem is that this string is stored exactly the same as the input: "a5 5c 31 33 34 af e0" instead of "a5 5c af e0". The SELECT outputs the escaped string (7 octets) instead of the unescaped string (4 octets), too. However, the server manages the following string differently: INSERT INTO x VALUES ('A\134B'); and SELECT * FROM x; outputs A\B Its size stored in the column is 3 octets. This second case is exactly what I need. I guess strings like "C:\dir" is properly processed too though I did not test it. Why server treats the first string in this undesired way? Regards, CN -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free