automatically handling gzip http responses in Android

Question

Reference: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/tutorial/html/httpagent.html#d4e1261

This page says the following code will setup HttpClient to

Answer 1

Here is the code that I use:

   mHttpClient.addResponseInterceptor(new HttpResponseInterceptor() {
       public void process(final HttpResponse response,
               final HttpContext context) throws HttpException,
               IOException {
           HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
           Header encheader = entity.getContentEncoding();
           if (encheader != null) {
               HeaderElement[] codecs = encheader.getElements();
               for (int i = 0; i < codecs.length; i++) {
                   if (codecs[i].getName().equalsIgnoreCase("gzip")) {
                       response.setEntity(new GzipDecompressingEntity(
                               entity));
                       return;
                   }
               }
           }
       }
   });

You might also want to look at SyncService.java from the Google I/O app.

Answer 2

Android is bundled with a rather old version of the Apache HTTP Client library which doesn't have the classes you are missing.

You can bundle a newer version of the Apache HTTP Client library with your application (see this answer) or use AndroidHttpClient instead which was introduced in API level 8.