Literal Escaped Octets

[Chason Hayes]

On Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:06:49 +0000, Bengt Richter wrote:

> On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:40:31 GMT, Chason Hayes <chasonh at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>I am trying to convert raw binary data to data with escaped octets in
>>order to store it in a bytea field on postgresql server. I could do this
>>easily in c/c++ but I need to do it in python. I am not sure how to read
>>and evaluate the binary value of a byte in a long string when it is a non
>>printable ascii value in python. I read some ways to use unpack from the
>>struct module, but i really couldn't understand where that would help. I
>>looked at the MIMIEncode module but I don't know how to convert the object
>>to a string. Is there a module that will convert the data? It seems to me
>>that this question must have been answered a million times before but I
>>can't find anything.
>>
> Have you considered just encoding the data as text in hex or base64, e.g.,
> 
>  >>> import binascii
>  >>> s = '\x00\x01\x02\x03ABCD0123'
>  >>> binascii.hexlify(s)
>  '000102034142434430313233'
>  >>> binascii.b2a_base64(s)
>  'AAECA0FCQ0QwMTIz\n'
> 
> which is also reversible later of course:
>  >>> h = binascii.hexlify(s)
>  >>> binascii.unhexlify(h)
>  '\x00\x01\x02\x03ABCD0123'
>  >>> b64 = binascii.b2a_base64(s)
>  >>> binascii.a2b_base64(b64)
>  '\x00\x01\x02\x03ABCD0123'
> 
> Regards,
> Bengt Richter

I had just about come to that conclusion last night while I was working on
it. I was going to use
import base64
base64.stringencode(binarydata)
and
base64.stringdecode(stringdata)

I then wasn't sure if I should still use the bytea field or just use a
text field.

Do you have a suggestion?