What is the purpose of the --compressed option in Curl?

The --compressed option in Curl is used to enable request compression. This is a process that allows the sending and receiving of compressed data, which can significantly reduce the amount of data being transferred over the network, thus speeding up the process.

When you use the --compressed option with Curl, it adds an "Accept-Encoding" header to your request, indicating to the server that it can accept compressed data. The header typically includes the types of compression that the client (i.e., Curl) can handle, such as gzip and deflate.

If the server supports compression and the specific type requested, it will compress the data before sending it. The server will also include a "Content-Encoding" header in its response to indicate the type of compression used.

When Curl receives the compressed data, it will automatically decompress it.

Here is an example of how to use the --compressed option in a Curl command:

curl --compressed -o example.html https://www.example.com

In this example, the -o example.html option is used to write the output to a file named example.html. If the --compressed option was not used and the server sent compressed data, the data written to example.html would be compressed and would need to be manually decompressed to view the HTML.

Please note that Curl does not support compression by default. The Curl executable must be built with zlib to add support for it.

JavaScript or Python do not have a direct equivalent to Curl's --compressed option, but similar functionality can be achieved with libraries that support HTTP and compression. For example, in Python, you can use the requests library with gzip module to handle compressed data:

import requests
import gzip

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com')
if 'gzip' in response.headers.get('Content-Encoding', ''):
    content = gzip.decompress(response.content)
else:
    content = response.content

In this Python example, we're checking if the Content-Encoding header includes 'gzip'. If it does, we use the gzip module to decompress the content. If not, we just use the content as it is.

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