joynes wrote: > This doesnt work for me but it is exactly what I want. When I run your > example I just get: > > >SELECT decode('10EUR', 'escape'); > decode > -------- > 10EUR > (1 rad) > > I get the same result, both if the database is UTF8 or > ISO-Latin1 and also > with different versions of postgres (7 and 8) > > And when I read the documentation for 'decode' it tells that > it just decodes > binary strings encoded with 'encode'. > How did you get that result from running decode? I suspect that somewhere along the line the Euro symbol I used in the query got changed to 'EUR'. Try some other string with weird characters. It will show all non-ASCII characters in escaped octal notation, while ASCII characters will remain as they are. This should help you - if I understood you correctly, you want to know the actual bytes stored in a database field. To find our the numeric representation of an ASCII field, you can use the function ascii(). Yours, Laurenz Albe ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq