Oracle database: How to read a BLOB?

Question

I\'m working with an Oracle database, and I would like to read the contents of a BLOB. How do I do this?

When I do a simple select statement, it merely returns \"(BLOB)

Answer 1

If you're interested to get the plaintext (body part) from a BLOB, you could use the CTX_DOC package.

For example, the CTX_DOC.FILTER procedure can "generate either a plain text or a HTML version of a document". Be aware that CTX_DOC.FILTER requires an index on the BLOB column. If you don't want that, you could use the CTX_DOC.POLICY_FILTER procedure instead, which doesn't require an index.