bcrypt and postgresql. What data type should be used?

Question

On flask-bcrypt extension, the encrypted string is stored as bytes object like this (with python 3.5):

>>> user.password
b'$2b$12$3UutBDuGIrxp2z95alVTp.0HO3qQEtk7O/emR0UC27aNaJKC/WCU.'

But, when that string stored on postgresql it's converted and become like this:

>>> user.password
'\\x243262243132244a546d7673453238354c754a497a4a334f37644a307559672f52796a486a526c4f443431536f387748544132303077447176555675'

Of course, it won't pass flask-bcrypt check password. I tried to encode the password before save it to database and whenever check password is called I decode it back. And it works.

My question is, what data type should I use? Am I have to use BLOB data type on postgresql? Or is what I've done above (encode and decode) the right thing to do? I don't have this issue when using sqlite3.

Answer 1

you need to convert the bytes to a python string (as all the bytes are ascii characters) then you can store it in a text (or other character type) column

Answer 2

I had a similar problem and I solved it using BYTEA data type at the Postgresql. I think problem occurs while writing byte array into VARCHAR datatype in Postgre. This might be related to database encoding and the details of that conversion from byte to varchar.