plpythonu and bytea

[Greg Steffensen <greg.steffensen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey, I'm trying to write some plpython procedures that read binary data
from images on the disk and store it in bytea fields.  I'm
basically trying to write a plpython procedure that accepts a varchar
and returns a bytea, with these procedure contents:

data = "">
return data

(The actual procedure will have more in it, but that's the tricky
part).  But the returned data is always severely truncated. 
Is returning a bytea from plpython impossible, or is there some way I
should escape the data string?  I've tried using the built in
encode and decode functions, but they don't seem to help.  If
worse comes to worse, I can store the base64 encoded version, of
course, but I'd rather not do that.  Any ideas?

Greg