I don’t know if you need to use zlib to decompress the data from the request. You should be able to access r.content directly.
I was able to get content (albeit with some interesting unicode at the beginning) from the request on my Mac (Python 2.7.1) so it sounds to me like there’s some proxy or out of date cache in the way if you’re not getting any new content.
–
Here’s the headers/content I got
>>> r.headers
{‘status’: ‘200 OK’, ‘content-length’: ‘19519’, ‘via’: ‘1.1 sbnation.com’, ‘content-encoding’: ‘deflate’, ‘vary’: ‘Accept-Encoding’, ‘x-runtime’: ‘108’, ‘connection’: ‘Keep-Alive’, ‘etag’: ‘“9b5325d4194bc6c6dd3c2c29a24c36a7”’, ‘cache-control’: ‘private, max-age=0, must-revalidate, private, max-age=0, must-revalidate’, ‘date’: ‘Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:12:49 GMT’, ‘p3p’: ‘CP=“CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa PSAa PSDa CONi OUR IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT CNT STA”’, ‘content-type’: ‘application/xml; charset=utf-8’}
>>> r.content
u'\x02\x00\x00\x00\ufffd\ufffd\x00\ufffd\x1f\x04\ufffd<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n<feed xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">\n
<title>The Verge -
All Posts</title>\n
<subtitle></subtitle>\n
<updated>2011-11-06T03:54:02Z</updated>\n
<id>http://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml</id>\n
<link type="text/html" rel="alternate" href="http://www.theverge.com/">\n
<entry>\n
<published>2011-11-06T03:54:02Z</published>\n
<updated>2011-11-06T03:54:02Z</updated>\n
<title>US Cellular <br>