How to make Content-Encoding: deflate readable?

Question

I'm creating a Python script to send alerts when a remote server's metrics are high. The server is using the Glances library running in webserver mode and my local machine is sending requests to the server's endpoints.

My requests get a response from the endpoint /api/3/cpu/total but when I output the content of this response it's in bytes, which when converted to a string, isn't the response I get when curling.

I've looked at previous answers relating to my situation but the ones I found are either from a long time ago or aren't relevant to a text output.

My Function

def call_endpoint(machine, endpoint):
    url = "http://" + machine + ":3101" + endpoint
    headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8", "Accept": "application/json"}
    try:
        response = requests.get(url=url, headers=headers)
        print(response.content)
        return response.json()
    except requests.HTTPError as http_err:
        print(http_err)

Headers from Response

{
    "Date":"Wed, 10 Feb 2021 14:27:02 GMT",
    "Server":"WSGIServer/0.2 CPython/3.8.5",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Origin":"*",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Methods":"GET, POST, PUT, OPTIONS",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Headers":"Origin, Accept, Content-Type, X-Requested-With, X-CSRF-Token",
    "Content-Type":"application/json; charset=utf-8",
    "Content-Encoding":"deflate",
    "Content-Length":"31"
}

Response from Function

b"x\x9c\xabV*\xc9/I\xccQ\xb2R0\xd03\xaf\x05\x00#'\x04P"

Response from curling

{"total": 1.9}

Answer 1

I added the header:

"Accept-Encoding": "gzip"

And I get a dict response now.

Hope this is useful to someone in the future!