title: Reading raw messages from Amazon SQS using boto
body: <p>By default, boto encodes messages with Base64 before the messages are sent to SQS. Example code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>conn = boto.connect_sqs('access_key_id', 'secret_key') 
  q = conn.get_queue('myqueue')
  m = Message()
  m.set_body('hello!')
  q.write(m)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>By replacing Message() with RawMessage(), I can send raw messages to the queue without encoding. But how do I read messages from the queue without decoding? If I use the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rs = q.get_messages(1)
  if rs:
      m = rs[0]
      print m.get_body()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>m.get_body() automatically returns the decoded result. Is there a way to retrieve raw messages?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>