Ok, very good, thanks to everyone who replied! I was hoping to see a methos within PostgreSQL itself (via INSERT or something), but I can test out a method using PHP instead, since that's the ultimate destination, anyhow.
Not sure how you expected to be able to issue an INSERT w/o some kind of client interface. If you need to do this via "psql" (i.e. the official PostgreSQL client) there are ways - though I am not that familiar with them. Typically I'd store the data into a file then do something like:
\set variable_name `cat filename.ext`
INSERT INTO tbl (col) VALUES (func_if_needed(:'variable_name'));
In which case you might or might not find it easier to use some text intermediary in order to avoid difficulty with "cat".
However, I assumed you were using something like PHP or Java and that you would most likely want to have any solution be within the same framework...
