How to convert Blob data to string in Arcpy?

Question

I am using Arcpy to load a table from Excel. One of the fields has a lot of text (up to 2000 characters) and when using arcpy.MakeTableView_management the field is given the type 'BLOB'. Is there any way to either prevent this from happening, i.e. making sure the field type is 'Text', or is there a way of reading the text in python so the data can be used?

I have read BLOB TYPE in Arcmap but it does not answer the question. I am specifically trying to read the data in Python, while the previous question referred to reading it in ArcMap.

Answer 1

Reading Blobs:

from arcpy import da
import os
with da.SearchCursor(r"c:\temp\demo.gdb\table",['blobFieldname','fileName']) as cursor:
   for row in cursor:
      binaryRep = row[0]
      fileName = row[1]
      # save to disk
      open(r"c:\saveFolder" + os.sep + fileName, 'wb').write(binaryRep.tobytes())
      del row
      del binaryRep
      del fileName