Raw Response Content

In the rare case that you’d like to get the raw socket response from the server, you can access r.raw. If you want to do this, make sure you set stream=True in your initial request. Once you do, you can do this:

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/events', stream=True)
>>> r.raw
<requests.packages.urllib3.response.HTTPResponse object at 0x101194810>
>>> r.raw.read(10)
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03'

In general, however, you should use a pattern like this to save what is being streamed to a file:

with open(filename, 'wb') as fd:
    for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size):
        fd.write(chunk)

Using Response.iter_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise have to handle when using Response.raw directly. When streaming a download, the above is the preferred and recommended way to retrieve the content.