Question

I have ruby-1.9.3-p327 with zlib installed. localhost:80 is the nginx simple test page.

require "net/http"
=> true
Net::HTTP::HAVE_ZLIB
=> true

res = Net::HTTP.start("localhost", "80") do |http|
  req = Net::HTTP::Get.new "/"
  req["accept-encoding"] = "gzip"
  http.request req
end
=> #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>

res.get_fields "content-encoding"
=> ["gzip"]
res.body
=> "\x1F\x8B\b\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\xEC\xBDi..."

The body was not decoded. Why?

Answer 1

If you use http.get it should decode it automaticlly, but it looks like request might not do it for you.

There clearly is code to decompress the gzip request here, but only for the get method:
https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v1_9_3_327/lib/net/http.rb#L1031