Sending gzipped data in WebRequest?

Question

I have a large amount of data (~100k) that my C# app is sending to my Apache server with mod_gzip installed. I'm attempting to gzip the data first using System.IO.Compression.GZipStream. PHP receives the raw gzipped data, so Apache is not uncompressing it as I would expect. Am I missing something?

System.Net.WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(this.Url);
req.Method = this.Method; // "post"
req.Timeout = this.Timeout;
req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
req.Headers.Add("Content-Encoding: gzip");

System.IO.Stream reqStream = req.GetRequestStream();

GZipStream gz = new GZipStream(reqStream, CompressionMode.Compress);

System.IO.StreamWriter sw = new System.IO.StreamWriter(gz, Encoding.ASCII);
sw.Write( large_amount_of_data );
sw.Close();

gz.Close();
reqStream.Close()


System.Net.WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse();
// (handle response...)

I'm not entirely sure "Content-Encoding: gzip" applies to client-supplied headers.

Answer 1

I looked at the source code for mod_gzip and I could not find any code that decompresses data. Apparently mod_gzip only compresses outgoing data which isn't too surprising after all. The functionality you are looking for is probably rarely used, and I'm afraid you have to do your own decompression on the server.