A bit confused about HttpClient[Java] handling gzip responses

Question

My application makes a http request to some api service, that service returns a gzipped response. How can I make sure that the response is indeed in gzip format? I'm confused at why after making the request I didn't have to decompress it. Below is my code: ``` public static String streamToString(InputStream stream) { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream)); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); String line; try { while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) { sb.append(line).append("
"); } } catch (IOException e) { logger.error("Error while streaming to string: {}", e); } finally { try { stream.close(); } catch (IOException e) { } } return sb.toString(); } public static String getResultFromHttpRequest(String url) throws IOException { // add retries, catch all exceptions HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpGet httpGet; HttpResponse httpResponse; InputStream stream; try { httpGet = new HttpGet(url); httpGet.setHeader("Content-Encoding"…

Accepted Answer

Hi I am late but this answer might by used who is facing same issue. By default content is decompressed in the response. So, you have to disable the default compression using following code:

```
CloseableHttpClient client = HttpClients.custom()
    .disableContentCompression()
    .build();

HttpGet request = new HttpGet(urlSring);
request.setHeader(HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_ENCODING, "gzip");

CloseableHttpResponse response = client.execute(request, context);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
Header contentEncodingHeader = entity.getContentEncoding();

if (contentEncodingHeader != null) {
    HeaderElement[] encodings =contentEncodingHeader.getElements();
    for (int i = 0; i < encodings.length; i++) {
        if (encodings[i].getName().equalsIgnoreCase("gzip")) {
            entity = new GzipDecompressingEntity(entity);
            break;
        }
    }
}

String output = EntityUtils.toString(entity, Charset.forName("UTF-8").name());
```

A bit confused about HttpClient[Java] handling gzip responses

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