Weird behaviour of C extension function

[Amaury Bouchard <amaury.bouchard@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everybody,

I have a really strange behaviour with a C function, wich gets a text as parameter.

Everything works fine when I call the function directly, giving a text string as parameter. But a problem occurs when I try to read data from a table.

To illustrate the problem, I stripped the function down to the minimum. The source code is below, but first, here is the behaviour :

Direct call

-----------

> select passthru('hello world!'), passthru('utf8 çhàràtérs'), passthru(' h3110 123 456 ');

INFO:  INPUT STRING: 'hello world!' (12)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: 'utf8 çhàràtérs' (18)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: ' h3110 123 456 ' (15)

(as you can see, the log messages show the correct input, with the number of bytes between parentheses)

Reading a table data

--------------------

> create table mytable ( str text);

> insert into mytable (str) values ('hello world!'), ('utf8 çhàràtérs'), (' h3110 123 456 ');

> select passthru(str) from mytable;
INFO:  INPUT STRING: 'lo world!' (12)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: '8 çhàràtérs' (18)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: '110 123 456 �
' (15)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: '��' (5)
INFO:  INPUT STRING: '' (3)

There, you can see that the pointer seems to be shifted 3 bytes farther.

Do you have any clue for this strange behaviour?

The source code

---------------

#include "postgres.h"
#include "fmgr.h"
#include "funcapi.h"

// PG module init
#ifdef PG_MODULE_MAGIC
PG_MODULE_MAGIC;
#endif
void _PG_init(void);
Datum passthru(PG_FUNCTION_ARGS);
PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1(passthru);

void _PG_init() {
}

Datum passthru(PG_FUNCTION_ARGS) {
        // get the input string
        text *input = PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP(0);
        char *input_pt = (char*)VARDATA(input);
        int32 input_len = VARSIZE_ANY_EXHDR(input);
        // create a null terminated copy of the input string
        char *str_copy = calloc(1, input_len + 1);
        memcpy(str_copy, input_pt, input_len);
        // log message
        elog(INFO, "INPUT STRING: '%s' (%d)", str_copy, input_len);
        free(str_copy);
        PG_RETURN_NULL();
}

Thank you.

Best regards,

Amaury Bouchard