HttpWebRequest and GZip Http Responses

HttpWebRequest and GZip Http Responses

 

The Client Side

This takes care of the server side and if you're using a browser, GZip support is pretty much automatic - it just works as most browsers can decompress Gzip content. But if you're using an HTTP client in the .NET framework - WebClient or HttpWebRequest - you'll find that Gzip is not natively supported. So how do you make your client request GZip content?

You start by adding an Accept-Encoding header to the request that tells the server to encode responses with GZip. That what the server code above is checking for to decide whether GZip needs to be applied. The client then receives the compressed response from the server and needs to decomress it.