No, it's not! It's easy to fetch a url's content into a bag of bytes. That's it. If the content of the page happens to contain an emoji (which hey, more and mo

No, it's not! It's easy to fetch a url's content into a bag of bytes. That's it. If the content of the page happens to contain an emoji (which hey, more and more do) or even a friggin' unicode double-quote mark, then you're no longer fetching it into a valid string, if you take string to mean faithful textual representation. You've got all the bytes there, but you can't interpret it correctly. This is a real problem that has caused real pain for me with various tools written in python2