why not in python 2.4.3

[Serge Orlov]

Rocco wrote:
> Also with ascii the function does not work.

Well, at least you fixed misconfiguration ;)

Googling for 1F8B (that's two first bytes from your strange python 2.4
result) gives a hint: it's a beginning of gzip stream. Maybe urllib2 in
python 2.4 reports to the server that it supports compressed data but
doesn't decompress it when receives the reply?