HttpWebRequest & Native GZip Compression

Question

When requesting a page with Gzip compression I am getting a lot of the following errors:

System.IO.InvalidDataException: The CRC in GZip footer does

Answer 1

The native GZipStream can read a compressed GZIP (RFC 1952) stream, but it can't handle the ZIP file format.

From http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial190_Zipping-files-using-GZipStream.html:

The disadvantage of using the GZipStream class over a 3rd party product is that it has limited capabilities. One of the limitations is that you cannot give a name to the file that you place in the archive. When GZipStream compresses the file into a ZIP archive, it takes the sequence of bytes from that file and uses compression algorithms that create a smaller sequence of bytes. The new sequence of bytes is put into the new ZIP file. When you open the ZIP file you will open the archived file itself; most popular ZIP extractors (WinZip, WinRar, etc.) will show you the content of the ZIP as a file that has the same as the archive itself.

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EDIT: The above note is incorrect. GZipStream does not produce a ZIP file. It is not a "Single file ZIP stream". It is a GZIP Stream. They are different things. There's no guarantee that tools that handle ZIP archives will handle a .gz file.

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For an implementation that can read ZIP archives, as opposed to single-file ZIP streams, try #ziplib (SharpZipLib, formerly NZipLib).