I've searched high and low, and all I've found is people being chided for trying to convert from Bytea to text :)

When I first designed my database, I simply didn't understand the purpose of bytea, I didn't actually realize that there *was* a text data type. (Actually, I was porting from a MS SQL database, and if I remember correctly, PgAdmin actually made the decision for me) I now need to convert my field from bytea to text, but there doesn't seem to be a clean way to do it. So far I have done the following:

alter table tbl_inventory ADD longdescription_new text;

update tbl_inventory SET longdescription_new = encode(longdescription, 'escape');

update tbl_inventory SET longdescription_new = replace(longdescription_new, '\256', '\n') WHERE longdescription_new LIKE '%\256%';

(ad infinitum)

The problem is that encode, obviously, escapes a metric ton of stuff, and I have no idea *what* is being encoded, or even what it is being encoded into, other than exhaustively digging through my data and comparing the escape codes to the original text. Is there a chart somewhere that will show me? Is there a script that will do this?

John

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