I'm using a redshift user defined function to interpret text from postgresql but I get this error:

```
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128).

```

None of the python code actually calls decode() but it seems like its happening in the background but I don't know how to stop it from doing that.

The return type of the udf is VARCHAR.