Sending and Receving Zip files with Python Requests

Question

I have two REST (Flask) APIs. The first API reads a zip file from the local disk, and returns it in the POST request. The second API calls the first API, and writes the file onto local.

Being a bit ignorant of encodings, I'm running into issues.

@app.route('/push/', methods=['POST'])
def push():
    with open('/path/to/zip_file.zip', 'r') as f:
        foo = f.read()
    return foo

@app.route('/pull/', methods=['POST'])
def pull():
    url = 'https://myhost.com/push/'
    r = requests.post(url, verify=False)
    with open(/new/path/to/zip_file.zip', 'w') as f:
        # f.write(r.text)  # this fails with UnicodeEncodeDecode error
        f.write(r.text.encode('utf-8'))  # this doesn't fail, but I can't unzip the resulting file

In the second API, I originally tried to f.write(r.text), but this failed with:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 63-64: ordinal not in range(128)

I tried changing it to f.write(r.text.encode('utf-8')) after Googling, and while the writing of the file then worked, I received the following error while attempting to unzip it in Linux:

error [OWBMaster_0.1.zip]:  missing 3112778871 bytes in zipfile
  (attempting to process anyway)
error [OWBMaster_0.1.zip]:  start of central directory not found;
  zipfile corrupt.
  (please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the
  appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly)

Is there a trick to sending zip files over REST with Requests?

Answer 1

Changing r.text to r.content fixed this:

@app.route('/pull/', methods=['POST'])
def pull():
    url = 'https://myhost.com/push/'
    r = requests.post(url, verify=False)
    with open(/new/path/to/zip_file.zip', 'w') as f:
    # f.write(r.content)

From this question :

r.text is the content of the response in unicode, and r.content is the content of the response in bytes