Thanks much. After some wiresharking, I found that google doesn't like the drakma user-agent and changing it to firefox did the trick.

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Edi Weitz <edi@agharta.de> wrote:
You are not allowed to send arbitrary characters in the request line.
FWIW, I just tried your example with Firefox and this is what the
browser sends according to LiveHttpHeaders:

 http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=%D0%B2%D1%8B

And Google returns the requested audio file.

Edi.

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 1:08 AM, William Halliburton
<whalliburton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello folks,
>
> I'm trying to use drakma to fetch urls that contain utf8 characters but
> HTTP-REQUEST automatically url encodes any non latin-1 ascii characters.
>
> On my cursory reading of the RFCs, this seems conforming behavor, but in
> this case it is definitely unwanted.
>
> For example, the following url
>
>   http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=вы
>
> if entered directly into the browser correctly returns the text-to-speech
> audo file but
>
> when attempting to use HTTP-REQUEST, the url is being url encoded into
>
>   http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=%D0%B2%D1%8B
>
> of which google does not url-decode and fails to return the correct data.
>
> So, for this case, the url-encoding is unwanted.
>
> I am willing to submit patch an additional argument into HTTP-REQUEST to
> disallow the encoding.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thank you,
> William
>
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