Rocco wrote: > Also with ascii the function does not work. Well, at least you fixed misconfiguration ;)
Googling for 1F8B (that's two first bytes from your strange python 2.4 result) gives a hint: it's a beginning of gzip stream. Maybe urllib2 in python 2.4 reports to the server that it supports compressed data but doesn't decompress it when receives the reply? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
