Last Updated : 12 Jul, 2025
When you make an HTTP request in Python using the requests library, it returns a response object. One of the most important attributes of this object is response.content, which gives you the raw response body in bytes. This is especially useful when dealing with binary data like images, PDFs, audio files, or any non-textual content.
Let's look at an example that demonstrates how to use request.content in step by step:
To use request module, we need to first install it using this command:
Basic Example: Reading Raw Response from an API Example 1:pip install requests
Let’s make a simple GET request to GitHub’s API and view the raw response content in bytes.
Python
import requests
res = requests.get('https://api.github.com/')
print(res.content)
Output:
Terminal OutputExplanation:
Download and save an image from a URL using response.content:
Python
import requests
img_url = 'https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/300'
res = requests.get(img_url)
with open('sample_image.png', 'wb') as f:
f.write(res.content)
Output:
This code downloads the image from the given URL and saves it as 'sample_image.png' in the current working directory..
This is the sample imageRetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
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