🔧 relax strictness around Response.json(...) that checked Content-Type prior to decoding

.readthedocs.yaml

@@ -1,9 +1,9 @@
 version: 2
 
 build:
-  os: ubuntu-22.04
+  os: ubuntu-24.04
   tools:
-    python: "3.10"
+    python: "3.12"
 
 sphinx:
    configuration: docs/conf.py

HISTORY.md

@@ -1,6 +1,14 @@
 Release History
 ===============
 
+3.12.3 (2025-01-28)
+-------------------
+
+**Changed**
+- Relaxed strict compliance on JSON parsing. We brought strict compliance into Niquests, a response
+  must explicitly set `Content-Type: application/json` or alike prior to attempt parsing the JSON string.
+  We decided to relax that constraint as old and bad-behaving server may send JSON with missing or broken Content-Type.
+
 3.12.2 (2025-01-22)
 -------------------
 

docs/requirements.txt

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 # Used by RTD to generate docs.
 Sphinx==7.2.6
 sphinx-copybutton==0.5.2
-urllib3.future>=2.1.900
+urllib3.future>=2.12.900
 wassima>=1,<2
 kiss_headers>=2,<4
 furo>=2023.9.10

src/niquests/__version__.py

@@ -9,9 +9,9 @@
 __url__: str = "https://niquests.readthedocs.io"
 
 __version__: str
-__version__ = "3.12.2"
+__version__ = "3.12.3"
 
-__build__: int = 0x031202
+__build__: int = 0x031203
 __author__: str = "Kenneth Reitz"
 __author_email__: str = "me@kennethreitz.org"
 __license__: str = "Apache-2.0"

src/niquests/models.py

@@ -1444,8 +1444,8 @@ def json(self, **kwargs: typing.Any) -> typing.Any:
             contain valid json or if content-type is not about json.
         """
 
-        if not self.content or "json" not in self.headers.get("content-type", "").lower():
-            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response content is not JSON", self.text or "", 0)
+        if not self.content:
+            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response content is not JSON", "", 0)
 
         if not self.encoding:
             # No encoding set. JSON RFC 4627 section 3 states we should expect
@@ -1467,10 +1467,13 @@ def json(self, **kwargs: typing.Any) -> typing.Any:
             ).best()
 
             if encoding_guess is not None:
+                self.encoding = encoding_guess.encoding
                 try:
                     return _json.loads(str(encoding_guess), **kwargs)
                 except _json.JSONDecodeError as e:
                     raise RequestsJSONDecodeError(e.msg, e.doc, e.pos)
+            else:
+                self.encoding = "utf-8"  # try Unicode anyway[...]
 
         plain_content = self.text
 
@@ -1813,8 +1816,8 @@ async def text(self) -> str | None:  # type: ignore[override]
     async def json(self, **kwargs: typing.Any) -> typing.Any:  # type: ignore[override]
         content = await self.content
 
-        if not content or "json" not in self.headers.get("content-type", "").lower():
-            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response content is not JSON", await self.text or "", 0)
+        if not content:
+            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response content is not JSON", "", 0)
 
         if not self.encoding:
             # No encoding set. JSON RFC 4627 section 3 states we should expect
@@ -1836,15 +1839,18 @@ async def json(self, **kwargs: typing.Any) -> typing.Any:  # type: ignore[overri
             ).best()
 
             if encoding_guess is not None:
+                self.encoding = encoding_guess.encoding
                 try:
                     return _json.loads(str(encoding_guess), **kwargs)
                 except _json.JSONDecodeError as e:
                     raise RequestsJSONDecodeError(e.msg, e.doc, e.pos)
+            else:
+                self.encoding = "utf-8"
 
         plain_content = await self.text
 
         if plain_content is None:
-            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response cannot lead to decodable JSON", "", 0)
+            raise RequestsJSONDecodeError("response cannot lead to unserializable JSON", "", 0)
 
         try:
             return _json.loads(plain_content, **kwargs)