that isn't a Kotlin-specific question. `Call` is a...

# announcements

[jw]

that isn't a Kotlin-specific question. Call is a representation of the pending request and its execution mechanism (which can either be synchronous or asynchronous). ResponseBody is the body type, which in this case is a general wrapper around any HTTP response that will allow you to interpret it as bytes or a string or a stream.

[Hexa]

okay thanks. I was wondering why my code still works if I change ResponseBody to String like this:

@GET("notes/res")
    Call<String> getDev()

. Does that mean I wrapped the the whole HTTP response into a String?

[jw]

Yes. But that will only work if you have a converter installed that can handle String. If you have a JSON converter installed it probably handles it in lenient mode. If you truly want a string representation of the HTTP response you should install the 'scalars' converter (separate artifact of Retrofit) before a JSON converter

[Hexa]

okay. I think my response was being interpreted as bytes then. that explains why I couldn't do response.body.toString() to get my response body. But doing this sorted it out new String(response.body.bytes())

[jw]

You're looking for response.body.string() which will honor the charset defined in the content type (if any)

[Hexa]

yes that works. less code

[jw]

feel free to ask about Retrofit and OkHttp in #C5HT9AL7Q