A text field in PostgreSQL is mixing unicode and str types

[Chris]

I'm using web2py with PostgreSQL and it's working pretty well, however, there's a weird problem. When I load a row with a text column in it, that column isn't one consistent type. It appears as <type 'unicode'> when it includes extended characters and <type 'str'> when it doesn't. I end up having to look up the type and call decode on just the strs to make sure they all have a consistent type and avoid the dreaded UnicodeDecodeError.

This is causing a bug on my setup which is Linux:

2.9.12-stable+timestamp.2015.01.17.06.11.03
(Running on Rocket 1.2.6, Python 2.7.0)

Will this/has this been patched? Is this a bug with my version of Python?

[Niphlod]

can you post an example app to reproduce the issue ?

[Chris]

Just spent some time reviewing this - looks OK now, I think I must have screwed up somewhere.

All db text fields in web2py are supposed to be bytestrings of <type 'str'>, right?