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.

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?

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

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())

You're looking for

response.body.string()

which will honor the charset defined in the content type (if any)

yes that works. less code

feel free to ask about Retrofit and OkHttp in #squarelibraries