BlobEncode($blob)

Some databases require blob's to be encoded manually before upload. Note if you use UpdateBlob( ) or UpdateBlobFile( ) the conversion is done automatically for you and you do not have to call this function. For PostgreSQL, currently, BlobEncode() can only be used for bytea fields.

Returns the encoded blob value.

Note that there is a connection property called blobEncodeType which has 3 legal values:

false - no need to perform encoding or decoding.
'I' - blob encoding required, and returned encoded blob is a numeric value (no need to quote).
'C' - blob encoding required, and returned encoded blob is a character value (requires quoting).

This is purely for documentation purposes, so that programs that accept multiple database drivers know what is the right thing to do when processing blobs.