Response content is the information about the server's response that is delivered back to our console when we send a request.
While interacting with the web, it's necessary to decode the response of the server. While working on an application, there are many cases in which we may have to deal with the raw, or JSON, or even binary response. For this, requests has the capability to automatically decode the content from the server. Requests can smoothly decode many of the Unicode charsets. To add to that, Requests makes informed guesses about the encoding of the response. This basically happens taking the headers into consideration.
If we access the value of r.content, it results us the response content in a raw string format. And if we access r.text, the Requests library encodes the response (r.content value) using r.encoding and returns a new encoding string. In case, if the value of r.encoding is None, Requests assumes the encoding type using r.apparent_encoding, which is provided by the chardet library.
We can access the server's response content in the following way:
>>> import requests >>> r = requests.get('https://google.com') >>> r.content '<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" …..' >>> type(r.content) <type 'str'> >>> r.text u'<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="en-IN"><head><meta content="........ >>> type(r.text) <type 'unicode'>
In the preceding lines, we try to get the google homepage, using requests.get() and assigning it to a variable r. The r variable turns out to be a request object here, and we can access the raw content using r.content and the encoded response content with r.text.
If we wish to find what encoding Requests is using, or if we desire to change the encoding, we can use the property r.encoding as shown in the following example:
>>> r.encoding 'ISO-8859-1' >>> r.encoding = 'utf-8'
In the first line of the code, we are trying to access the type of encoding that is being followed by Requests. It resulted in 'ISO-8859-1'. In the next line, I wished to change the encoding to 'utf-8'. So I assigned the type of encoding to r.encoding. If we change the encoding like we did in the second line, Requests tends to use the latest value of r.encoding that has been assigned. So from that point in time, it uses the same encoding whenever we call r.text.
For an instance, if the value of r.encoding is None, Requests tend to use the value of r.apparent_encoding. The following example explains the case:
>>> r.encoding = None >>> r.apparent_encoding 'ascii'
Generally, the value of apparent encoding is specified by the chardet library. With more enthusiasm, if we attempt to set a new encoding type to r.apparent_encoding, Requests raises an AttributeError as its value can't be altered.
>>> r.apparent_encoding = 'ISO-8859-1' Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> AttributeError: can't set attribute
Requests are efficient enough to use custom encodings. Take a case in which we have created an encoding of our own, and got it registered with the module of codecs. We can use our custom codec with ease; this is because the values of r.encoding and Requests will take care of the decoding.