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