Net.WebClient and Deflate

In a previous entry, Net.WebClient and Gzip, I posted a code snippet that enables the missing HTTP compression in Net.WebClient, using the always handy SharpZipLib.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/01/net-webclient-and-deflate.html

deflate is the original Zip compression, unpatented and released to the public domain.

gzip is the same algorithm (IIRC) but the format has been made streamable and with less overhead (since it only contains one streamed file).

compress is an older, usually not-as-tight, and until last year patented compression algorithm.

Thanks for the post. You’ve just saved me hours of work … and probably some hair! :wink:

Cheers, Pete

Excellent work. Saved me hours of hassle

I know this is old, but I thought I’d clarify a misconception by Erich. gzip is the same algorithm, but there’s more overhead to it, as it adds a CRC.

Nice article. Quite useful.

Perhaps someone would be interested to see more examples. http://johnwilliams.eu