"The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have available, and as such whether they are a duck or a tiger." I don't get this... Why no

"The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have available, and as such whether they are a duck or a tiger." I don't get this... Why not do the following: In [1]: import requests In [2]: resp = requests.get('http://www.google.com') In [3]: resp. resp.apparent_encoding resp.iter_lines resp.close resp.json resp.connection resp.links resp.content resp.ok resp.cookies resp.raise_for_status resp.elapsed resp.raw resp.encoding resp.reason resp.headers resp.request resp.history resp.status_code resp.is_permanent_redirect resp.text resp.is_redirect resp.url resp.iter_content Now you can try each of those things and explore their methods.