I found the answer. You can change the code to: var request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(requestUri); request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip | DecompressionMethods.Deflate; And you will have automatic decompression. No need to change the rest of the code.
Something like the following will print the raw content, including the “$type $length\0” header: perl -MCompress::Zlib -e ‘undef $/; print uncompress(<>)’ \ < .git/objects/27/de0a1dd5a89a94990618632967a1c86a82d577
UPDATE: Browsers have been dropping support for raw deflate. zOompf has completed some very thorough research on this very topic here. Unfortunately, it appears that raw deflate is NOT safe to use. Check http://www.vervestudios.co/projects/compression-tests/results for more results. Here are the browsers that have been tested: /* Browser DEFLATE ZLIB */ XP Internet Explorer 6 PASS … Read more
For anyone coming across this in recent times, the request library supports gzip decompression out of the box now. Use as follows: request( { method: ‘GET’ , uri: ‘http://www.google.com’ , gzip: true } , function (error, response, body) { // body is the decompressed response body console.log(‘server encoded the data as: ‘ + (response.headers[‘content-encoding’] || … Read more
Why use deflate instead of gzip for text files served by Apache? The simple answer is don’t. RFC 2616 defines deflate as: deflate The “zlib” format defined in RFC 1950 in combination with the “deflate” compression mechanism described in RFC 1951 The zlib format is defined in RFC 1950 as : 0 1 +—+—+ |CMF|FLG| … Read more