The use of urllib for REST APIs is impaired in the absence of a "Accept: */*" header such as that added automatically by the requests package or by the CURL command-line tool.



# Example that gets an incorrect result due to the missing header
import urllib
print urllib.urlopen('http://graph.facebook.com/raymondh').headers['Content-Type']

# Equivalent call using CURL
$ curl -v http://graph.facebook.com/raymondh
...
* Connected to graph.facebook.com (31.13.75.1) port 80 (#0)
> GET /raymondh HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.30.0
> Host: graph.facebook.com
> Accept: */*
>