How to check if a file is gzip compressed?

Question

I have a C / C++ program which needs to read in a file that may or may not be gzip compressed. I know we can use gzread() from zlib to read in both compressed and uncompress

Answer 1

Do you prefer false positives, false negatives, or no false results at all (there goes performance down the drain...)?

The RFC 1952: GZIP file format specification version 4.3 states the first 2 bytes (of each member and therefore) of the file are '\x1F' and '\x8B'. Use that for a first check that can result in false positives.