Decoding HTTP chunked + gzipped content

Question

How would one decode a server response that is

1) transfer-encode: chunked 2) content-type: gzip

I need to do this manually and can't just use curl to send the request. I need to decode from the raw $string.

Here's a function that is supposed to unchunk a HTTP reponse (php):

function unchunkHttpResponse($str=null) {
if (!is_string($str) or strlen($str) < 1) { return false; }
$eol = "\r\n";
$add = strlen($eol);
$tmp = $str;
$str = '';
do {
    $tmp = ltrim($tmp);
    $pos = strpos($tmp, $eol);
    if ($pos === false) { return false; }
    $len = hexdec(substr($tmp,0,$pos));
    if (!is_numeric($len) or $len < 0) { return false; }
    $str .= substr($tmp, ($pos + $add), $len);
    $tmp  = substr($tmp, ($len + $pos + $add));
    $check = trim($tmp);
    } while(!empty($check));
unset($tmp);
return $str;
}

But it seems to not work with gzipped content (gzinflate is not in this snippet). I tried doing gzinflate on the returned content but that doesn't work at all.

Any ideas? Or how do gzip + transfer encoding chunked work together?

Thanks

Slartibartfast Slartibartfast · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-13T23:02:55

Could you start by verifying that this function indeed properly aggregates chunked response by trying it against some text response. I'm not proficient in php so I can't say for sure if this function will work, but as gzipped response will be binary, I wonder if concatenating it to string is OK thing to do. And could you explain why you need to "decode from the raw $string"? Why using some client that is proven to handle all HTTP details properly, and inflating whatever it returns is not working for you?

Decoding HTTP chunked + gzipped content

1 Answers