How to read a csv django http response

In a view, I create a Django HttpResponse object composed entirely of a csv using a simply csv writer: response = HttpResponse(content_type='text/csv') response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="foobar.csv"' writer = csv.writer(response) table_headers = ['Foo', 'Bar'] writer.writerow(table_headers) bunch_of_rows = [['foo', 'bar'], ['foo2', 'bar2']] for row in bunch_of_rows: writer.writerow(row) return response In a unit test, I want to test some aspects of this csv, so I need to read it. I'm trying to do so like so: response = views.myview(args) reader = csv.reader(response.content) headers = next(reader) row_count = 1 + sum(1 for row in reader) self.assertEqual(row_count, 3) # header + 1 row for each attempt self.assertIn('Foo', headers) But the test fails with the following on the headers = next(reader) line: nose.proxy.Error: iterator should return strings, not int (did you open the file in text mode?) I see in the HttpResponse source that response.content is spitting the string back out as a byte-string, but I'm not sure the correct way to deal with that to let csv.reader read the file correctly. I thought I would be able to just replace response.content with response (since you write to the object itself, not it's content), but that just resulted in a slight variation in the error: _csv.Error: iterator should return strings, not bytes (did you open the file in text mode?) Which seems closer but obviously still wrong. Reading the csv docs, I assume I am failing to open the file correctly. How do I "open" this file-like object so that csv.reader can parse it?