Thanks Serge. It's a gzip string. So the code is >>> import urllib2 >>> def takefeed(url): request=urllib2.Request(url) request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5;Windows NT') opener = urllib2.build_opener() data=opener.open(request).read() return data
>>> url='http://news.google.it/?output=rss' >>> d=takefeed(url) >>> from StringIO import StringIO >>> zipdata=StringIO(d) >>> import gzip >>> gz=gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=zipdata) >>> rss=gz.read() >>> len(rss) 102529 >>> print rss[0:100] <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><generator>NFE/1.0</generator><tit >>> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list