Is there a way to encode binary data in a text format for submitting
to Firebird?

I'm experimenting with a CHAR(16) column with OCTETS, and it seems to
work just jolly well for retrieving binary data and for updating
binary data with parameters, but I can't seem to find a way to
represent the raw binary data such that I can, say, put it into a SQL
statement in a tool. A number of other databases represent the raw
data with a hex prefix (e.g. 0x) or have a RAW type that takes
hexadecimal values directly (Oracle does this).

I've been up and down the source on SourceForge and as far as I can
tell, if a value is not quoted then it better be a number or
identifier, and if it is quoted, the contents are basically left
untouched.

You can prefix a value with an underscored version of the character
set used, e.g. _LATIN1 'My Text' instead of just 'My Text', but I
cannot see whether or even if any translation is performed on that value.

Is there a way of representing raw binary (which could include zeroes)
as text to send to Firebird?

Cheers,

-- Ritchie Annand