Literal Escaped Octets

[Chason Hayes]

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 13:39:17 +0000, Steve Holden wrote:

> Chason Hayes 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.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> See http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/datatype-binary.html
>> for a description of the problem domain.
>> 
>> 
> The URL you reference is discussing how you represent arbitrary values 
> in string literals. If you already have the data in a Python string the 
> best advise is to use a parameterized query - that way your Python DB 
> API module will do the escaping for you!
> 
> regards
>   Steve

Thanks for the input. I tried that with a format string and a
dictionary, but I still received a database error indicating illegal
string values. This error went away completely when I used a test file
consisting only of text, but reproduced everytime with a true binary file.
If you can let me know where I am wrong or show me a code snippet with a
sql insert that contains a variable with raw binary data that works,
I would greatly appreciate it.

Chason