It's impossible to insert binary data using PostgreSQL with Eloquent

Postgres requires that binary data is marked with a special PDO attribute on bindValue, PDO::PARAM_LOB. Not doing this raises the following error:

SQLSTATE[22021]: Character not in repertoire: 7 ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x ...

This is despite the fact that the column type is correct, bytea. Postgres chokes because it's passed with PDO::PARAM_STR.

How can I fix this so that I can insert binary data in Postgres, as I can with MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite?

By reading the documentation, I thought that perhaps if I created my Postgres database with the SQL_ASCII character set, it wouldn't do any validation, which is a hack to get around this bug. Unfortunately, this led to even more breakage in my Laravel application; model attributes started turning into stream resources sometimes, and failing with this error other times:

SQLSTATE[22P02]: Invalid text representation: 7 ERROR: invalid input syntax for type bytea (SQL: insert into "captcha" ("client_ip", "solution", "hash", "created_at") values , VmG, �M��fany�W3xO˭�ҏ\, 2015-11-07 07:59:46) returning "

And here's a dd() of the stream resource (which is just an attribute on my Eloquent model):

stream resource @382 ▼
  stream_type: "MEMORY"
  mode: "w+b"
  unread_bytes: 0
  seekable: true
  timed_out: false
  blocked: true
  eof: false
  options: []
}

This problem has been around since Laravel 4 and an entire library exists to deal with it. This does not work with Laravel 5.

http://packalyst.com/packages/package/ooxif/laravel-query-param

The PostgreSQL implementation of Eloquent needs some way of knowing if it should pass in PDO::PARAM_LOB instead of PDO::PARAM_STR. I'm not sure the specifics, but I think this should be the case with any binary item.