Compliance ---------- Requests is intended to be compliant with all relevant specifications and RFCs where that compliance will not cause difficulties for users. This attention to the specification can lead to some behaviour that may seem unusual to those not familiar with the relevant specification. Encodings ^^^^^^^^^ When you receive a response, Requests makes a guess at the encoding to use for decoding the response when you access the :attr:`Response.text ` attribute. Requests will first check for an encoding in the HTTP header, and if none is present, will use `chardet `_ to attempt to guess the encoding. The only time Requests will not do this is if no explicit charset is present in the HTTP headers **and** the ``Content-Type`` header contains ``text``. In this situation, `RFC 2616 `_ specifies that the default charset must be ``ISO-8859-1``. Requests follows the specification in this case. If you require a different encoding, you can manually set the :attr:`Response.encoding ` property, or use the raw :attr:`Response.content `.