Showing Drupal BLOB data in phpMyAdmin

Drupal 7 stores lots of settings in the database as BLOBs – Binary Large OBjects. When coding, you often need to see what's going on in these BLOBbed fields, but the default phpMyAdmin configuration won't let you examine this data.

The solution is to tweak phpMyAdmin's config file (config.inc.php) to include the following lines:


$cfg['ProtectBinary'] = false;
$cfg['DisplayBinaryAsHex'] = false;


You should now be able to see the serialised data.