Ask python:
>>> r=urllib.urlopen("http://google.com")
>>> a=r.read()
>>> type(a)
0: <type 'str'>
>>> help(a.decode)
Help on built-in function decode:
decode(...)
S.decode([encoding[,errors]]) -> object
Decodes S using the codec registered for encoding. encoding defaults
to the default encoding. errors may be given to set a different error
handling scheme. Default is 'strict' meaning that encoding errors raise
a UnicodeDecodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore' and 'replace'
as well as any other name registered with codecs.register_error that is
able to handle UnicodeDecodeErrors.
>>> b = a.decode('utf8')
>>> type(b)
1: <type 'unicode'>
>>>
So, it appears that read()
returns an str
. .decode()
decodes from UTF-8 to Python's internal unicode format.