request-response.rst: review type references around body mentions

docs/topics/request-response.rst

@@ -51,12 +51,10 @@ Request objects
        given, the dict passed in this parameter will be shallow copied.
     :type meta: dict
 
-    :param body: the request body. If a ``unicode`` is passed, then it's encoded to
-      ``str`` using the ``encoding`` passed (which defaults to ``utf-8``). If
-      ``body`` is not given, an empty string is stored. Regardless of the
-      type of this argument, the final value stored will be a ``str`` (never
-      ``unicode`` or ``None``).
-    :type body: str
+    :param body: the request body. If a string is passed, it is converted to
+        bytes using *encoding*, which defaults to ``utf-8``. If not passed or
+        ``None`` is passed, an empty bytes array is stored.
+    :type body: bytes
 
     :param headers: the headers of this request. The dict values can be strings
        (for single valued headers) or lists (for multi-valued headers). If
@@ -106,7 +104,7 @@ Request objects
 
     :param encoding: the encoding of this request (defaults to ``'utf-8'``).
        This encoding will be used to percent-encode the URL and to convert the
-       body to ``str`` (if given as ``unicode``).
+       body to bytes if given as a string.
     :type encoding: str
 
     :param priority: the priority of this request (defaults to ``0``).
@@ -159,7 +157,7 @@ Request objects
 
     .. attribute:: Request.body
 
-        A str that contains the request body.
+        The request body as bytes.
 
         This attribute is read-only. To change the body of a Request use
         :meth:`replace`.
@@ -598,7 +596,7 @@ Response objects
        (for single valued headers) or lists (for multi-valued headers).
     :type headers: dict
 
-    :param body: the response body. To access the decoded text as str you can use
+    :param body: the response body. To access the decoded text as a string, use
        ``response.text`` from an encoding-aware
        :ref:`Response subclass <topics-request-response-ref-response-subclasses>`,
        such as :class:`TextResponse`.
@@ -646,10 +644,10 @@ Response objects
 
     .. attribute:: Response.body
 
-        The body of this Response. Keep in mind that Response.body
-        is always a bytes object. If you want the unicode version use
-        :attr:`TextResponse.text` (only available in :class:`TextResponse`
-        and subclasses).
+        The response body as bytes.
+
+        If you want the body as a string, use :attr:`TextResponse.text` (only
+        available in :class:`TextResponse` and subclasses).
 
         This attribute is read-only. To change the body of a Response use
         :meth:`replace`.
@@ -768,10 +766,10 @@ TextResponse objects
     is the same as for the :class:`Response` class and is not documented here.
 
     :param encoding: is a string which contains the encoding to use for this
-       response. If you create a :class:`TextResponse` object with a unicode
-       body, it will be encoded using this encoding (remember the body attribute
-       is always a string). If ``encoding`` is ``None`` (default value), the
-       encoding will be looked up in the response headers and body instead.
+       response. If you create a :class:`TextResponse` object with a string as
+       body, it will be converted to bytes encoded using this encoding. If
+       *encoding* is ``None`` (default), the encoding will be looked up in the
+       response headers and body instead.
     :type encoding: str
 
     :class:`TextResponse` objects support the following attributes in addition
@@ -779,7 +777,7 @@ TextResponse objects
 
     .. attribute:: TextResponse.text
 
-       Response body, as unicode.
+       Response body as a string.
 
        The same as ``response.body.decode(response.encoding)``, but the
        result is cached after the first call, so you can access
@@ -787,8 +785,8 @@ TextResponse objects
 
        .. note::
 
-            ``unicode(response.body)`` is not a correct way to convert response
-            body to unicode: you would be using the system default encoding
+            ``str(response.body)`` is not a correct way to convert the response
+            body into a string: you would be using the system default encoding
             (typically ``ascii``) instead of the response encoding.