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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T19:05:18+00:00

I have a client that will be posting large JSON files to an API

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I have a client that will be posting large JSON files to an API server. Since the files are so compressable, I would like to gzip them and send the compressed data.

What I would like to know is: What is the best way to signal my intent to the server?

Basically, I want the reverse of Accept-encoding, such that the server would treat the data as only compressed for transport purposes, and automatically decompress the data before interpreting it according to the Content-Type.

This means that I can’t set the Content-Type field to application/gzip because it needs to be application/json for the server to understand what the true uncompressed data encoding is.

Content-Transfer-Encoding looks like it would serve my purposes, but it was built with email in mind, and only supports 7bit, quoted-printable, base64, 8bit, and binary.

Does transparent compression/decompression for HTTP transport from client to server exist? And if not, what are the best practices for what I’m trying to achieve?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The “reverse” of the Accept-encoding header is Content-encoding. This signals to the server that the content is gzipped:

    Content-encoding: gzip

    You’re correct that you shouldn’t use the Content-type header for this, since the gzip compression is purely a matter of how the request is encoded, not what it represents.

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