Question

I need to get the raw server response, with headers. This also means that gzipped or deflated content should still be compressed. I don’t want any changes done to what is received.

Is this possible with PHP?

I tried with curl but that doesn’t seem to be working, I set these to zero:

             CURLOPT_HTTP_CONTENT_DECODING => 0, 
             CURLOPT_HTTP_TRANSFER_DECODING => 0,

But no help.

I tried with fsockopen but that seems to uncompress automatically as well.

Anything else?

Edit: these are all my curl headers:

$options = array(CURLOPT_URL => 'http://www.example.com/', 
             CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 20,
             CURLOPT_HEADER => 1, 
             CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1, 
             CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => 1, 
             CURLOPT_USERAGENT => $user_agent, 
             //CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'HEAD',
             //CURLOPT_NOBODY => true,
             CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
                 //CURLOPT_HTTP_CONTENT_DECODING => 0, 
                 //CURLOPT_HTTP_TRANSFER_DECODING => 0,
             CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER => 1,
             CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Accept' => 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8', 
                                         'Accept-Language' => 'en-us', 
                                         'Accept-Encoding' => 'gzip, deflate'));

Thanks.

Answer 1

fsockopen won’t automatically decompress, but you if you are rolling your own HTTP client, you must tell the server you’re ready to accept a gzipped response, other the server will send you an uncompressed one.

You can do this by including an Accept-Encoding header in your request, e.g.

Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip