Writing fixtures to load binary data into MySQL database with PHPUnit

Question

I have to write some tests and in order for they to work they need to have some pre-existing data loaded in the database.

For most cases I got it working using the phpunit extension to load the fixtures (specified in .YML files) into the db. The problem for me is that some tables contain information stored as binary even tough they are text ones.

So how can I setup the initial state for tables that contain those binary columns?

$dataset = new PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_DataSet_YamlDataSet("{$datasetDir}/InitialState.yml");