Binary Data Type

The bytes data type allows storage of binary strings.

A binary string is a sequence of octets (or bytes). Binary strings are distinguished from character strings in two ways. First, binary strings specifically allow storing octets of value zero and other "non-printable" octets (usually, octets outside the decimal range 32 to 126). Character strings disallow zero octets, and also disallow any other invalid Unicode characters. Second, operations on binary strings process the actual bytes, whereas the processing of character strings depends on locale settings. In short, binary strings are appropriate for storing data that the programmer thinks of as "raw bytes", whereas character strings are appropriate for storing text.

For compatibility reasons, Hyper provides the following aliases for the bytes type: bytea, blob, and varbinary. The SQL standard defines a different binary string type, called BLOB or BINARY LARGE OBJECT. The input format is different from bytes, but the provided functions and operators are mostly the same.

bytes Hex Format

The bytes type supports input and output using the "hex" format.

The "hex" format encodes binary data as 2 hexadecimal digits per byte, most significant nibble first. The entire string is preceded by the sequence \x In some contexts, the initial backslash may need to be escaped by doubling it. For input, the hexadecimal digits can be either upper or lower case.

Example:

SELECT '\xDEADBEEF'::bytea;