Escaping hstore contains operators in a JDBC Prepared statement

I am using PostgreSQL 9.1.4 with hstore and the PostgreSQL JDBC driver (9.1-901.jdbc4).

I am trying to use the contains operators (?, ?&, ?|) in a PreparedStatement, however the ? character is parsed as a variable placeholder. Can this character be escaped to send the correct operator in the query?

An example:

PreparedStatement stmt = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT a, b FROM table1 WHERE c ? 'foo' AND d = ?");
stmt.setInt(1, dValue);
stmt.executeQuery();

In this form the following example would raise an exception:

org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: No value specified for parameter 2.

Update:

After investigating the query parser in the pgjdbc driver this snippet seems to indicate that it is not possible to escape the ? character. The questions that remain are:

• Is there anything in the JDBC spec which allows a ? to be escaped and be anything other than a parameter placeholder?
• Is there any better work around for this issue than just using plain Statements with variables manually inserted into the query string?

Effectively, it looks like the java SQL parser is not hstore compliant.

But since the syntax c ? 'foo' is equivalent to exist(c, 'foo'), you can easily workaround this problem. Have a look at the following page to see what the verbose operators for hstore are.

Postgres hstore documentation