Get document as normal text and not as binary data

Hi.

I used urllib2 to load a html-document through http. But my problem
is:
The loaded contents are returned as binary data, that means that every
character is displayed like l???t, for example. How can I get the
contents as normal text?

My script was:

import urllib2
req = urllib2.Request(url)
f = urllib2.urlopen(req)
contents = f.read()
print contents
f.close()

Thanks!

Markus