pg8000 in py2 eventually calls text_out with a str object, causing an unnecessary failure

[infinity0]

Hi, text_out is causing errors with Apple's CalendarServer. Details of the issue here.

TL;DR is that I can fix the immediate problem by applying this patch:

diff --git a/pg8000/core.py b/pg8000/core.py
index 246e0b6..14093cc 100644
--- a/pg8000/core.py
+++ b/pg8000/core.py
@@ -1350,6 +1350,7 @@ class Connection(object):
         self.ParameterStatusReceived += self.handle_PARAMETER_STATUS

         def text_out(v):
+            if not isinstance(v, text_type): return v
             return v.encode(self._client_encoding)

         def time_out(v):

However I'm not sure if this is best for pg8000 in general. Please let me know what you think, and also if we need to patch CalendarServer in some other way as well.

[tlocke]

The short answer is that under Python 2 it's probably a good idea to send strings as unicode() objects, rather than str() objects.

Having said that, I think that pg8000 is doing the wrong thing when running under Python 2. If it receives a str() it should really send it unmodified (ie. use the bytea_send() method). I'll go ahead and put something up and see what people think.

[tlocke]

For sending a str under Python 2 we used to do an encode() on it, then
send it. The problem was this first does an implicit decode() with the
default encoding (usually ascii) and the decode would fail on anything
that wasn't valid ascii encoded bytes. To solve that we now say that
under Python 2, str types are sent unmodified. For users of the library
it's safest to send strings using the unicode type. I've pushed this change to the main rep.

[tlocke]

I think this issue is addressed in release 1.10.4, so I'll close this issue.