Helen,

H> But something like
H> a text format that includes both data and blobs I can't relate to...

never received an e-mail with an attachment?
The world is full of text encoding methods for binary data.

Anyway (just to make this post not entirely useless <g>) the
IB_DataPump is not the same as IBX's batch output/input. Perhaps the
IB_Export/IB_Import pair is a better match, but I can't say whether
they support text blobs or not since I am away from Delphi at the
moment. I guess they do.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
mailto:nandod@...