Frequently Asked Questions

This part of the documentation answers common questions about Niquests.

Encoded Data?

Niquests automatically decompresses gzip-encoded responses, and does its best to decode response content to unicode when possible.

When either the brotli or brotlicffi package is installed, requests also decodes Brotli-encoded responses.

You can get direct access to the raw response (and even the socket), if needed as well.

Custom User-Agents?

Niquests allows you to easily override User-Agent strings, along with any other HTTP Header. See documentation about headers.

What are “hostname doesn’t match” errors?

These errors occur when SSL certificate verification fails to match the certificate the server responds with to the hostname Niquests thinks it’s contacting. If you’re certain the server’s SSL setup is correct (for example, because you can visit the site with your browser).

Server-Name-Indication, or SNI, is an official extension to SSL where the client tells the server what hostname it is contacting. This is important when servers are using Virtual Hosting. When such servers are hosting more than one SSL site they need to be able to return the appropriate certificate based on the hostname the client is connecting to.

Python 3 already includes native support for SNI in their SSL modules.