How to String-a-fy a blob to write via PBDOM

Friends

I have a little project that reads a PDF document (FileRead in streammode!) into a  BLOB and then must write out the pdf as XML via PBDOM.

How can I convert the BLOB into a string? == the string (<blob>) function is looking for string inside the blob which these bytes are NOT.

.NET has xmlwriter WriteBase64 ( ) method that will convert a byte array into characters.  But there does not appear to be a similar helper function in PB

How to do this in PB Classic?

Thanks