Changing return Type for a SHOW CREATE TABLE command.

[Carl Jolly]

I'm accessing MySQL via JDBC and issuing the query "SHOW CREATE TABLE <tablename>" when I get the result set back the columns return are of type VARBINARY (-3) equivalent to the java byte[] type. Question becomes is there a way to have the returned columns for a show command Cast to a VARCHAR or TEXT type at the SQL level? or a way of getting the data using a select statement? I'm trying to keep my java code that gets the results decoupled from the code that submits the query so I don't want to have somenthing like "If the SQL starts with SHOW and the database engine is MYSQL and if the Return type is VARBINARY then convert it to a String type.