Good evening everyone, I apologize for the delay in replying and that you had to "reverse engineer" my question.
This turned out indeed to be a special char problem. On MBA with macOS Sierra 10.12.5 I am using Postgres 9.5.4.1 of postgresapp.com. At the psql prompt I had copy-pasted: words=> SELECT 1, 'You have resigned ' || 1 || ':' || 1; ERROR: type " " does not exist LINE 1: SELECT 1, 'You have resigned ' || 1 || ':' || 1; ^ After I removed the "white space" char before ':', everything worked. In vi (after \e) I could see that special char by typing %!xxd 00000000: 5345 4c45 4354 2031 2c20 2759 6f75 2068 SELECT 1, 'You h 00000010: 6176 6520 7265 7369 676e 6564 2027 207c ave resigned ' | 00000020: 7c20 3120 7c7c c2a0 273a 2720 7c7c 2031 | 1 ||..':' || 1 00000030: 3b0a ;. Thank you.