@rymo4 I don't think we want to encode the body.  This library should be agnostic to format/encoding and treat the body as raw binary data.

Granted, as this issue points out it was already clearly broken :smile:

What it should do is assert that `body` is a `str` (the caller should be encoding their data correctly and providing raw binary data to this method).

encoding `params` as you've done below should be fine...