Saving and reading binary content into postgres

I'm trying to save binary data from a file metadata.mfs into the postgres database and then reading from the database, grab the saved binary data and load it into a file. For the purpose of illustrating my goal lets also call it metadata.mfs with the same name but in a different directory. When I run md5sum metadata.mfs on both files I am expecting to see the same hash. (Essentially I want whatever is saved into the database from file1 be exactly the same as what I extract from the database in file2)

Currently I am not able to achieve that.

Below is what I have so far:

string readFile2(const string &fileName)
{
    ifstream ifs(fileName.c_str(), ios::in | ios::binary | ios::ate);
    ifs.seekg(0, ios::end);

    ifstream::pos_type fileSize = ifs.tellg();
    ifs.seekg(0, ios::beg);

    vector<char> bytes(fileSize);
    ifs.read(bytes.data(), fileSize);
    cout.write(bytes.data(),bytes.size());
    cout << "\n";
    cout << fileSize;
    cout << "\n";
    // return bytes.data();
    return string(bytes.data(), fileSize);
}

int main() {
  string content;
  string test = "h";
  char test1 = 'C';
  try {
    cout << "A1 \n";;
    content = readFile2("/var/opt/lizardfs/lib/lizardfs/metadata.mfs");
    pqxx::connection c("postgresql://mark@localhost:26257/metadata");
    pqxx::nontransaction w(c);


    w.exec("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS binary (id INT PRIMARY KEY, meta bytea)");
    w.exec("INSERT INTO binary (id,meta) VALUES (18, '"+w.esc_raw(content)+"')");
    
    pqxx::result r = w.exec("SELECT meta FROM binary WHERE id='18'");
    std::ofstream outfile("metadata.mfs");
    for (auto row: r) {
        cout << row[0] << endl;
        outfile << row[0] << endl;
    }
    outfile.close();
    w.commit()
}

The problem is that cout.write(bytes.data(),bytes.size()); prints out exactly the same as what I would see in the linux terminal if I run cat metadata.mfs, but from cout << row[0] << endl I see everything in hex, ie, \x4c495a4d20322e39000021....

I suspect this is because I am using w.esc_raw() on the binary content before inserting into postgres. Does that mean I need to unescape, ie using w.unesc_raw() after extracting the binary data from the database? But how would I do that? I've been looking at the docs here: https://libpqxx.readthedocs.io/en/6.1.1/a00225.html