Name

ST_AsEWKB — Return the Extended Well-Known Binary (EWKB) representation of the geometry with SRID meta data.

Synopsis

bytea ST_AsEWKB(geometry g1);

bytea ST_AsEWKB(geometry g1, text NDR_or_XDR);

Description

Returns the Extended Well-Known Binary (EWKB) representation of the geometry with SRID metadata. The first function variant defaults to encoding using server machine endian. The second function variant takes a text argument specifying the endian encoding, either little-endian ('NDR') or big-endian ('XDR').

WKB format is useful to read geometry data from the database and maintaining full numeric precision. This avoids the precision rounding that can happen with text formats such as WKT.

To perform the inverse conversion of EWKB to PostGIS geometry use ST_GeomFromEWKB.

[Note]

To get the OGC/ISO WKB format use ST_AsBinary. Note that OGC/ISO WKB format does not include the SRID.

Enhanced: 2.0.0 support for Polyhedral surfaces, Triangles and TIN was introduced.

This function supports 3d and will not drop the z-index.

This method supports Circular Strings and Curves.

This function supports Polyhedral surfaces.

This function supports Triangles and Triangulated Irregular Network Surfaces (TIN).

Examples

SELECT ST_AsEWKB(ST_GeomFromText('POLYGON((0 0,0 1,1 1,1 0,0 0))',4326));

		   st_asewkb
--------------------------------
\x0103000020e610000001000000050000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000f03f000000000000f03f000000000000f03f000000000000f03f00000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000
			SELECT ST_AsEWKB(ST_GeomFromText('POLYGON((0 0,0 1,1 1,1 0,0 0))',4326), 'XDR');
		   st_asewkb
--------------------------------
\x0020000003000010e600000001000000050000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
003ff00000000000003ff00000000000003ff00000000000003ff000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000