Add support for utf-8 error messages

* Both server and client should be fine with utf-8 error messages now
* Adding an interop test: special status message

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 9 deletions

diff --git a/src/python/grpcio/grpc/_common.py b/src/python/grpcio/grpc/_common.py
index d35f4566bd..42f3a4e614 100644
--- a/src/python/grpcio/grpc/_common.py
+++ b/src/python/grpcio/grpc/_common.py
@@ -66,18 +66,13 @@ def encode(s):
     if isinstance(s, bytes):
         return s
     else:
-        return s.encode('ascii')
+        return s.encode('utf8')
 
 
 def decode(b):
-    if isinstance(b, str):
-        return b
-    else:
-        try:
-            return b.decode('utf8')
-        except UnicodeDecodeError:
-            _LOGGER.exception('Invalid encoding on %s', b)
-            return b.decode('latin1')
+    if isinstance(b, bytes):
+        return b.decode('utf-8', 'replace')
+    return b
 
 
 def _transform(message, transformer, exception_message):