.NET: Is it possible to get HttpWebRequest to automatically decompress gzip'd responses?

Question

In this answer, I described how I resorted to wrappnig a GZipStream around the response stream in a HttpWebResponse, in order to decompress it.

The relevant code looks like this:

HttpWebRequest hwr = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(url); hwr.CookieContainer =     PersistentCookies.GetCookieContainerForUrl(url); hwr.Accept = "text/xml, */*"; hwr.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptEncoding, "gzip, deflate"); hwr.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptLanguage, "en-us"); hwr.UserAgent = "My special app"; hwr.KeepAlive = true;  using (var resp = (HttpWebResponse) hwr.GetResponse())  {     using(Stream s = resp.GetResponseStream())     {         Stream s2 = s;         if (resp.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains("gzip"))             s2 = new GZipStream(s2, CompressionMode.Decompress);         else if (resp.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains("deflate"))             s2 = new DeflateStream(s2, CompressionMode.Decompress);           ... use s2 ...     } } 

Is there a way to get HttpWebResponse to provide a de-compressing stream, automatically? In other words, a way for me to eliminate the following from the above code:

      Stream s2 = s;       if (resp.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains("gzip"))           s2 = new GZipStream(s2, CompressionMode.Decompress);       else if (resp.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains("deflate"))           s2 = new DeflateStream(s2, CompressionMode.Decompress); 

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use the HttpWebRequest.AutomaticDecompression property as follows:

HttpWebRequest hwr = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(url); hwr.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.Deflate | DecompressionMethods.GZip; 

It's not necessary to manually add the Accept-Encoding HTTP header; it will automatically be added when that property is used.

(Also, I know this is just example code, but the HttpWebResponse object should be placed in a using block so it's disposed correctly when you've finished using it.)