Python Website "downloads page" returns binary data

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#2,411 opened on Mar 16, 2024 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 3/5
Estimated time: 1-2 days
Newbie friendliness: 42/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: python
Domain: web-dev

Research direction

Start by reproducing the problem with the provided curl and wget commands against https://www.python.org/downloads/. Inspect the response and the downloads-page serving path to determine why the saved content is binary; done means both commands return readable HTML for the downloads page.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug help-wanted

Describe the bug

When attempting to curl or wget the downloads page, the web server returns binary data

https://www.python.org/downloads

To Reproduce

Execute either of the following commands in Debian Linux

curl --location 'https://www.python.org/downloads/'
wget 'https://www.python.org/downloads/'

Example execution:

user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$ curl --location 'https://www.python.org/downloads'
Warning: Binary output can mess up your terminal. Use "--output -" to tell 
Warning: curl to output it to your terminal anyway, or consider "--output 
Warning: <FILE>" to save to a file.
user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$

user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$ wget 'https://www.python.org/downloads/'
--2024-03-15 19:17:59--  https://www.python.org/downloads/
Resolving www.python.org (www.python.org)... 199.232.16.223, 2a04:4e42:41::223
Connecting to www.python.org (www.python.org)|199.232.16.223|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 19113 (19K) [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’

index.html          100%[===================>]  18.67K  --.-KB/s    in 0.05s   

2024-03-15 19:18:00 (384 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [19113/19113]

user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$ 

user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$ head -c256 index.html 
�}�r�F����*�CS�5����|�,;�؎'r���M�@$a����o���������'���ƥ�$(R�@�rD��s���ލ�?[�^/m6
                                                                               �у�?���t&l��g���1vD��97���z��s�.�;v_|
                                    �ǰƯ��?m�r&������e=pۓp-�����]���J��u�߭�r��L��h�567��q�vk�r���<�^�\y����mX����:{�yӹ�Bc�O��1x�user@disp897:/tmp/tmp.aQ3uHh4PqB$

Expected behavior
The pyhon.org webserver(s) should return HTML

Dominant language: Python
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Avg merge: 1d 23h
Merged PRs (30d): 14

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