Thread: Casting varchar to bytea

Hi. Could someone please tell me how to convert a "varchar" to a "bytea" datatype.

I have a column which contains a number stored as a varchar. I have another column of type bytea. I'm trying to insert
thevalue of the varchar column in the bytea column, but the conversion won't work. 

Something like the following:

update webuser set ccnum = ccnumstring::bytea where userid=userid;

Any ideas how to do this?

Also, I have the PGCRYPTO module and I can't get the AES algorithm to decrypt properly. It will encrypt, but not
decrypt.However, I can get the BLOWFISH algorithm to work in both directions. Can someone please give me an example of
decryptingusing the AES algorithm? 

Thanks in advance.

Dylan

On Friday 12 September 2003 20:39, Dylan Milks wrote:
> Hi. Could someone please tell me how to convert a "varchar" to a "bytea"
> datatype.
>
> I have a column which contains a number stored as a varchar. I have another
> column of type bytea. I'm trying to insert the value of the varchar column
> in the bytea column, but the conversion won't work.
>
> Something like the following:
>
> update webuser set ccnum = ccnumstring::bytea where userid=userid;
>
> Any ideas how to do this?

Does

update webuser set ccnum = decode(ccnumstring::text, 'encode')

work?


Ian Barwick
barwick@gmx.net

Thanks, that helped. This is what we did:

(to encode VARCHAR -> BYTEA)
update webuser set ccnum = decode(ccnumstring, 'escape') where userid=userid

(to decode BYTEA -> VARCHAR)
select encode(ccnum, 'escape') from webuser

But what about decrypting with the AES encryption algorithm?

Dylan

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Barwick [mailto:barwick@gmx.net]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 2:36 PM
To: Dylan Milks; PostgreSQL (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Casting varchar to bytea


On Friday 12 September 2003 20:39, Dylan Milks wrote:
> Hi. Could someone please tell me how to convert a "varchar" to a "bytea"
> datatype.
>
> I have a column which contains a number stored as a varchar. I have another
> column of type bytea. I'm trying to insert the value of the varchar column
> in the bytea column, but the conversion won't work.
>
> Something like the following:
>
> update webuser set ccnum = ccnumstring::bytea where userid=userid;
>
> Any ideas how to do this?

Does

update webuser set ccnum = decode(ccnumstring::text, 'encode')

work?


Ian Barwick
barwick@gmx.net