This page is returned in gzip
encoding.
(Try printing out response.headers['content-encoding']
to verify this.)
Most likely the web-site doesn't respect 'Accept-Encoding' field in request and suggests that the client supports gzip (most modern browsers do).
urllib2
doesn't support deflating, but you can use gzip
module for that as described e.g. in this thread: Does python urllib2 automatically uncompress gzip data fetched from webpage? .