WireShark doesn't decode gzip'ed http traffic on Windows

expert picture expert · Oct 17, 2012 · Viewed 13.6k times · Source

Do you guys know why WireShark may refuse to decode gzip'ed http traffic on Windows?

My configuration

  • WireShark 1.8.3
  • Windows 7 Ultimate x64
  • WinPcap 4.1.2

Option "Uncompressed entity bodies" is checked in Preferences / Protocols / HTTP.

Here is how my "Follow TCP Stream" dialog looks like:

enter image description here

When I first open this dialog radio-button below is set to "Raw", but when I click on "ASCII" nothing changes.

Any ideas ?

Answer

Graham Bloice picture Graham Bloice · Oct 17, 2012

If you look at the protocol tree under the "Line-based text data" entry you will see the uncompressed data. The "Follow TCP Stream" dialog just shows the contents of the TCP payload and doesn't interpret it as HTTP or gzipped data or anything else. The buttons on the dialog allow you to set the display format for the stream bytes.

You can right-click on the uncompressed data(see the red # below) and select 'Export Selected Packet Bytes...' to save to a file

enter image description here