Support for content-encoding: deflate raw

How does one ask Express to process a POST with a header for ‘content-encoding: deflate’ where the data is raw (without the data headers and footers)?

I’m noticing there’s code in express node-fetch that checks for magic bytes in the first block to decide between createInflate() and createInflateRaw() but it’s not in body-parser.

body-parser read.js

switch (encoding) {
    case 'deflate':
      stream = zlib.createInflate()
      req.pipe(stream)
      break
    case 'gzip':
       ...

node-fetch index.js

const raw = res.pipe(new PassThrough$1());
raw.once('data', function (chunk) {
    // see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37519828
    if ((chunk[0] & 0x0F) === 0x08) {
        body = body.pipe(zlib.createInflate());
    } else {
        body = body.pipe(zlib.createInflateRaw());
    }

[dougwilson]

It’s interesting that expressjs goes outside the standard to support deflate raw in node-fetch, but remains strict in body-parser.

I’m not sure what leads you to believe that the expressjs project manages node-fetch. We only manage the projets in our expresssjs github organization. I’m not even sure who manages node-fetch, but it is certainly unrelated to expressjs.

It’s also interesting to realize that after all this time, the standard is a bit off and could have been improved.

We don’t manage the standards, just implement them. If you think the standards should be changed, you should reach out to the standard organization that manages that particular one and have them update it.

[dougwilson]

How does one ask Express to process a POST with a header for ‘content-encoding: deflate’ where the data is raw (without the data headers and footers)?

Sorry, I missed this direct question at the top 😅. There isn’t really a good way to do this with body-parser currently. You can always use the raw() parser and delete req.headers[‘content-encoding’] . But perhaps a better method would be someone who needs this feature can contribute an API to define custom decoders based on the content-encoding (and override existing ones with their custom impls).