What is the underlying representation of BLOB data when I export it?

Question

When I export a blob object to an SQL file, I get some thing like this for a blob field:

0x4f3a383a227374644.....,

Questions

• I would like to know how the BLOB is actually converted to the above format?
• What is its underlying representation?

Answer 1

If you use mysqldump, you can specify the hexadecimal format for BLOB data

mysqldump -u... -p... --hex-blob --all-databases ...

Here is the help on hex-blob in mysqldump

$ mysqldump --help | grep -A 1 "blob" | head -2
  --hex-blob          Dump binary strings (BINARY, VARBINARY, BLOB) in
                      hexadecimal format.