import requests


def download_http(url):
    """
    Makes an http request for the contents at the given url and returns the response body.
    """
    response = requests.get(url)
    response.raise_for_status()

    # Encoding here prevents a UnicodeDecodeError later in make_zip_in_memory in Python 2.
    response_str = response.text.encode('utf-8')
    return response_str