Easy HTTP requests with gzip/deflate compression

Note: as of 2019, request has gzip decompression built in. You can still decompress requests manually using the below method.

You can simply combine request and zlib with streams.

Here is an example assuming you have a server listening on port 8000 :

var request = require('request'), zlib = require('zlib');

var headers = {
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip'
};

request({url:'http://localhost:8000/', 'headers': headers})
    .pipe(zlib.createGunzip()) // unzip
    .pipe(process.stdout); // do whatever you want with the stream

Here's a working example that gunzips the response

function gunzipJSON(response){

    var gunzip = zlib.createGunzip();
    var json = "";

    gunzip.on('data', function(data){
        json += data.toString();
    });

    gunzip.on('end', function(){
        parseJSON(json);
    });

    response.pipe(gunzip);
}

Full code: https://gist.github.com/0xPr0xy/5002984

For anyone coming across this in recent times, the request library supports gzip decompression out of the box now. Use as follows:

request(
    { method: 'GET'
    , uri: 'http://www.google.com'
    , gzip: true
    }
  , function (error, response, body) {
      // body is the decompressed response body
      console.log('server encoded the data as: ' + (response.headers['content-encoding'] || 'identity'))
      console.log('the decoded data is: ' + body)
    }
  )

From the github readme https://github.com/request/request

gzip - If true, add an Accept-Encoding header to request compressed content encodings from the server (if not already present) and decode supported content encodings in the response. Note: Automatic decoding of the response content is performed on the body data returned through request (both through the request stream and passed to the callback function) but is not performed on the response stream (available from the response event) which is the unmodified http.IncomingMessage object which may contain compressed data. See example below.