Why does my NSURLConnection report an incorrect expectedContentLength

Question

I have an NSURLConnection and in didReceiveResponse I\'m checking [response expectedContentLength] and getting really large values like 18446744073

Answer 1

To avoid this problem, set header field "Accept-Encoding" to @"gzip;q=0". that tells the server that you do not accept gzip, and will if possible send uncompressed.

Answer 2

The answer, related to the comments, is that it's because the result is gzip encoded. Oddly, the value for the expectedContentLength seems to be junk, and cannot be trusted. If the result is gzip encoded, then NSURLConnection cannot properly determine the size of the unencoded result.