Question

Is it possible to force MongoDB to show the binary data instead of displaying <Mongo Binary Data>? I know it is not always possible, but best effort would be enough.

I have seen this in both RockMongo and MongoDB shell.

Additional information: I am saving strings in various encodings (not just UTF-8), but I would still like to be able to read them in shell or RockMongo (at least ASCII characters, others could be replaced with \xx or similar).

Answer 1

I solved it in RockMongo for myself. In app/classes/VarExportor.php find function _formatVar($var) there is a switch that handles different types of data. Just add:

case "MongoBinData":
    $this->_jsonParams[$this->_paramIndex] = 
        'MongoBinData("' . $var->bin . '")';
    return $this->_param($this->_paramIndex);

Maybe one should also escape the $var->bin – not sure, but other vars are not escaped either so I’m guessing some other layer takes care of that.

Hope it helps someone.