How can one dump/ examine the exact content of a database column?

SELECT DUMP(col1)
FROM tab1
WHERE cond1 = val1;

DUMP(COL1)
-------------------------------------
Typ=96 Len=4: 65,66,67,32
For this example the type is 96, indicating CHAR, and the last byte in the column is 32, which is the ASCII code for a space. This tells us that this column is blank-padded.