to unescape_bytea use stripcslashes(). If you need to escape bytea and don't have pg_escape_bytea() function then use:
function escByteA($binData) {
  /**
   * \134 = 92 = backslash, \000 = 00 = NULL, \047 = 39 = Single Quote
   *
   * str_replace() replaces the searches array in order. Therefore, we must
   * process the 'backslash' character first. If we process it last, it'll
   * replace all the escaped backslashes from the other searches that came
   * before.
   */
  $search = array(chr(92), chr(0), chr(39));
  $replace = array('\\\134', '\\\000', '\\\047');
  $binData = str_replace($search, $replace, $binData);
  return $binData;
  //echo "<pre>$binData</pre>";
  //exit;
}