2.3. Response Content

We can read the content of the server’s response. Consider the GitHub timeline again:

>>> import requests

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events')
>>> r.text
u'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

Requests will automatically decode content from the server. Most unicode charsets are seamlessly decoded.

When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the encoding of the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Requests is used when you access r.text. You can find out what encoding Requests is using, and change it, using the r.encoding property:

>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'

If you change the encoding, Requests will use the new value of r.encoding whenever you call r.text. You might want to do this in any situation where you can apply special logic to work out what the encoding of the content will be. For example, HTTP and XML have the ability to specify their encoding in their body. In situations like this, you should use r.content to find the encoding, and then set r.encoding. This will let you use r.text with the correct encoding.

Requests will also use custom encodings in the event that you need them. If you have created your own encoding and registered it with the codecs module, you can simply use the codec name as the value of r.encoding and Requests will handle the decoding for you.