tom wrote: > the way that I'm using perl is to do a full prepare and execute > statements, which as I understand perl, will do all the character > escaping necessary to store the message. meaning, If I have > characters like (') or (`) they should be escaped when they are > entered into the SQL parameter. I am wondering if this is indeed the > case. > > But I'm looking for any suggestions or considerations when trying to > d this approach to avoid this kind of text parsing problem. Assuming you're using DBD::Pg and a placeholder for the bytea parameter of your query, you must specify its type explicitly, like this: use DBD::Pg qw(:pg_types); [...] $s=$dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO the_table(contents) VALUES(?)"); $s->bind_param(1, $the_data, { pg_type => DBD::Pg::PG_BYTEA }); $s->execute; Hope this helps, -- Daniel PostgreSQL-powered mail user agent and storage: http://www.manitou-mail.org