89 lines
3.3 KiB
ReStructuredText
89 lines
3.3 KiB
ReStructuredText
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.. _faq:
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Frequently Asked Questions
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==========================
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This part of the documentation answers common questions about Requests.
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Encoded Data?
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-------------
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Requests automatically decompresses gzip-encoded responses, and does
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its best to decode response content to unicode when possible.
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You can get direct access to the raw response (and even the socket),
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if needed as well.
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Custom User-Agents?
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-------------------
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Requests allows you to easily override User-Agent strings, along with
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any other HTTP Header.
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Why not Httplib2?
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-----------------
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Chris Adams gave an excellent summary on
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`Hacker News <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884406>`_:
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httplib2 is part of why you should use requests: it's far more respectable
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as a client but not as well documented and it still takes way too much code
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for basic operations. I appreciate what httplib2 is trying to do, that
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there's a ton of hard low-level annoyances in building a modern HTTP
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client, but really, just use requests instead. Kenneth Reitz is very
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motivated and he gets the degree to which simple things should be simple
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whereas httplib2 feels more like an academic exercise than something
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people should use to build production systems[1].
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Disclosure: I'm listed in the requests AUTHORS file but can claim credit
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for, oh, about 0.0001% of the awesomeness.
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1. http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/issues/detail?id=96 is a good example:
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an annoying bug which affect many people, there was a fix available for
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months, which worked great when I applied it in a fork and pounded a couple
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TB of data through it, but it took over a year to make it into trunk and
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even longer to make it onto PyPI where any other project which required "
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httplib2" would get the working version.
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Python 3 Support?
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-----------------
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Yes! Here's a list of Python platforms that are officially
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supported:
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* Python 2.6
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* Python 2.7
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* Python 3.1
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* Python 3.2
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* Python 3.3
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* Python 3.4
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* PyPy 1.9
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* PyPy 2.2
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What are "hostname doesn't match" errors?
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-----------------------------------------
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These errors occur when :ref:`SSL certificate verification <verification>`
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fails to match the certificate the server responds with to the hostname
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Requests thinks it's contacting. If you're certain the server's SSL setup is
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correct (for example, because you can visit the site with your browser) and
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you're using Python 2.6 or 2.7, a possible explanation is that you need
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Server-Name-Indication.
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`Server-Name-Indication`_, or SNI, is an official extension to SSL where the
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client tells the server what hostname it is contacting. This is important
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when servers are using `Virtual Hosting`_. When such servers are hosting
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more than one SSL site they need to be able to return the appropriate
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certificate based on the hostname the client is connecting to.
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Python3's SSL module includes native support for SNI. This support has not been
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back ported to Python2. For information on using SNI with Requests on Python2
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refer to this `Stack Overflow answer`_.
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.. _`Server-Name-Indication`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
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.. _`virtual hosting`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting
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.. _`Stack Overflow answer`: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18578439/using-requests-with-tls-doesnt-give-sni-support/18579484#18579484
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