Psycopg psycopg

Comments and changes to this ticket

• 

  Daniele Varrazzo 2011-03-16 12:05:59 UTC

  Hello,

  the check should be correct: an encoded empty string correctly decoded should have input s="\x" and output str="", so the check str[0] == 'x' should fail and the error shouldn't be raised.

  This check also proves an empty bytea only represented with \x is correctly handled:

  In [1]: import psycopg2
  
  In [2]: cnn = psycopg2.connect('')
  
  In [3]: cur = cnn.cursor()
  
  In [4]: cur.execute(r"select E'\\x'::bytea")
  
  In [5]: str(cur.fetchone()[0])
  Out[5]: ''
  

  Are you sure the libpq psycopg is linked to is the correct version? Please take a look using:

  ldd path/to/psycopg2/_psycopg.so | grep libpq
  

  What is decode_fn? Can you provide a self-contained failing test case?

  I think we really need to have our own hex format parser instead of relying on the libpq one anyway...

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  Adam Petrovic 2011-03-16 14:06:46 UTC

  Yes, linked libpq is ok
  

  ldd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so
  libpq.so.5 => /usr/pgsql-9.0/lib/libpq.so.5 (0xb7824000)
  

  Unfortunately I can't provide any complete test case - decode_fn is custom function written in C that was used before with PostgreSQL 8.4 and psycopg2 2.0.

  However I found another test case when SELECT of BYTEA fails:
  

  In [1]: import psycopg2
  
  In [2]: conn = psycopg2.connect("")
  
  In [3]: cur = conn.cursor()
  
  In [4]: cur.execute("SELECT ''::BYTEA")
  
  In [5]: cur.fetchall()
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  InterfaceError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
  
  /root/<ipython console> 
  
  InterfaceError: can't receive bytea data from server >= 9.0 with the current libpq client library: please update the libpq to at least 9.0 or set bytea_output to 'escape' in the server config or with a query
  
  In [6]: cur.execute(r"SELECT E'\\x'::bytea")
  
  In [7]: cur.fetchall()
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  InterfaceError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
  
  /root/<ipython console> 
  
  InterfaceError: can't receive bytea data from server >= 9.0 with the current libpq client library: please update the libpq to at least 9.0 or set bytea_output to 'escape' in the server config or with a query
  

  After closing ipython and repeating those commands again, everything was OK.
  My colleague looked at PQunescapeBytea function and found out that when unescaping empty data, it allocates 1 byte and returns it unchanged - so there actually could be some bad data from last allocation. Could this be the problem?

• 

  Daniele Varrazzo 2011-03-16 15:04:09 UTC

  • Tag changed from “rel-2.4” to “bytea, rel-2.4”

  I don't think the libpq can retain data across different invocations of a python process: its state should be cleaned when the process terminates.

  It still smells like a different libpq version getting linked somehow (I see your libpq is in a non-standard path). Your test passes regularly here (using the system libpq from backported debian 9.0.3 package on ubuntu). Do you have a libpq in /usr/lib/ too?

  In [4]: cur.execute("SELECT ''::BYTEA")
  
  In [5]: cur.fetchall()
  Out[5]: [(<read-only buffer for 0x7fb21d54c390, size 0, offset 0 at 0x134bd30>,)]
  
  In [6]: cur.execute(r"SELECT E'\\x'::bytea")
  
  In [7]: cur.fetchall()
  Out[7]: [(<read-only buffer for 0x7fb21d54c330, size 0, offset 0 at 0x134bef0>,)]
  

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  Adam Petrovic 2011-03-16 16:28:59 UTC

  We're using PGRPMS on CentOS - so wen can run pg 8.4 and 9.0. But on this server there's only v9.0.
  Like I said - once it raised those errors and for the second time, everything was ok. So we tried to apply this patch

  diff -Naur psycopg2-2.4/psycopg/typecast_binary.c psycopg2-2.4-fix/psycopg/typecast_binary.c
  --- psycopg2-2.4/psycopg/typecast_binary.c  2011-02-24 11:38:28.000000000 +0100
  +++ psycopg2-2.4-fix/psycopg/typecast_binary.c  2011-03-16 16:44:25.701055330 +0100
  @@ -168,7 +168,7 @@
  
  /* Check the escaping was successful */
  if (s[0] == '\\' && s[1] == 'x' /* input encoded in hex format */
  - && str[0] == 'x' /* output resulted in an 'x' */
  + && len > 0 && str[0] == 'x' /* output resulted in an 'x' */
  && s[2] != '7' && s[3] != '8') /* input wasn't really an x (0x78) */
  {
  PyErr_SetString(InterfaceError,
  

  and it seem ok, no errors - it skips escape check if PQunescapeBytea returns empty string (len == 0, but str is 1 byte long with uninitialized data).
  Please consider this as a patch and if it could cause any problems. Thanks

• 

  Daniele Varrazzo 2011-03-16 16:36:38 UTC

  Thank you for the patch, but I think a safer approach would be to ditch entirely the libpq unescape and deal with the hex format ourselves - it is an easy to parse format after all.

  I should have done it for the 2.4 release: it is my only regret for an otherwise perfect release. Will fix it in 2.4.1: will try to write the patch this weekend.

• 

  Daniele Varrazzo 2011-03-26 13:22:19 UTC

  • State changed from “new” to “resolved”

  Just pushed our own bytea hex parser, there is no more need of a specific libpq version on the client.

  I've added a specific test for '\x' to be parsed correctly. Feel free to make your own test: source available on my repos (https://github.com/dvarrazzo/psycopg - 'devel' branch).

• 

  Daniele Varrazzo 2011-03-28 13:13:40 UTC

  By the way, your analysis was correct: the check str[0] is wrong when len == 0.

  The libpq allocates at least one byte to avoid a non portable malloc(0). I was in the mindset of a null-terminated string, but str[0] was reading an uninitialized block of memory.

  Your patch would have been to be applied, but now it's superseded by having our own parser. Thank you very much anyway.