Just encode to bytes if it isn't bytes.

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kafka/producer/simple.py b/kafka/producer/simple.py
index 17e0977..2699cf2 100644
--- a/kafka/producer/simple.py
+++ b/kafka/producer/simple.py
@@ -70,10 +70,12 @@ class SimpleProducer(Producer):
 
     def send_messages(self, topic, *msg):
         if not isinstance(topic, six.binary_type):
-            raise TypeError("topic must be type bytes")
+            topic = topic.encode('utf-8')
 
         partition = self._next_partition(topic)
-        return super(SimpleProducer, self).send_messages(topic, partition, *msg)
+        return super(SimpleProducer, self).send_messages(
+            topic, partition, *msg
+        )
 
     def __repr__(self):
         return '<SimpleProducer batch=%s>' % self.async