Question

I recently switched from MySQL to PostgreSQL. I have one problem left however.

Previously, I would store small images in the BLOB format in MySQL.

PostgreSQL doesn’t know such thing as a BLOB.

I tried using BYTEA field type instead. This actually inserts an large (hexadecimal?) string I guess, but now I’m stuck trying to get this string back to displaying an actual image in PHP..

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Here is a piece of code I use to save the image in the database:

$data = bin2hex(file_get_contents('php://input'));

if (!empty($data)) {
  $sql = "UPDATE asset SET data = X'%s' WHERE uuid = '%s'";
  $args = array($data, $asset_uuid);
}

psql (9.1.3) and php 5.3.6 are used

Answer 1

Both answers posted here gave me some thoughts, but none were 100% of the answer.

So, I will explain in this answer what I did to get it to work.

When displaying the image, I used this:

header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');

$data = pack("H*", pg_unescape_bytea($data));

echo $data;

I’m running PHP 5.3.8, in PHP 5.4.0 it turns out you can use hex2bin instead of pack.

When adding the image to the database, I used this:

$data = pg_escape_bytea($data); // Escape input for PostgreSQL
$sql  = "UPDATE asset SET data = '%s'WHERE uuid = '%s'";

I’m glad it is working now. Thank you both Daniel and Johann!