for that confirmation I reported the bug to the PHP team, and they issued a patch.I would also suggest to postgres developpers to simplify their code and go back to SQL standards :) That BINARY CURSOR thing should be avoided. With MySQL for instance, a cursor will read the same way any type of data, binary or text.
I think you're rather confused. The BINARY CURSOR is for emitted binary data, not reading it. If you declare a normal cursor over a binary (bytea) field, you will get its text representation quite happily.
Chris