Why is that bad? The result returned from an URL is always binary. In certain situations it could be text but it doesn't have to be. If the result was an image

Why is that bad? The result returned from an URL is always binary. In certain situations it could be text but it doesn't have to be. If the result was an image and you would want to convert the data to image, if it was sound file same, you should think of text as another distinguished type. Of course urllib could have method text() that would do such conversion, but then urllib is not requests. It never was user friendly. Edit: personally I use aiohttp, the interface is much nicer: https://aiohttp.readthedocs.io/en/stable/client_reference.html#aiohttp.ClientResponse.text https://aiohttp.readthedocs.io/en/stable/client_reference.ht... if I can't use asyncio then would use requests.