1 files changed, 60 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/lib/README.encoding b/lib/README.encoding
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d31b36
--- /dev/null
+++ b/lib/README.encoding
@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+
+                    Content Encoding Support for libcurl
+
+* About content encodings:
+
+HTTP/1.1 [RFC 2616] specifies that a client may request that a server encode
+its response. This is usually used to compress a response using one of a set
+of commonly available compression techniques. These schemes are `deflate' (the
+zlib algorithm), `gzip' and `compress' [sec 3.5, RFC 2616]. A client requests
+that the sever perform an encoding by including an Accept-Encoding header in
+the request document. The value of the header should be one of the recognized
+tokens `deflate', ... (there's a way to register new schemes/tokens, see sec
+3.5 of the spec). A server MAY honor the client's encoding request. When a
+response is encoded, the server includes a Content-Encoding header in the
+response. The value of the Content-Encoding header indicates which scheme was
+used to encode the data.
+
+A client may tell a server that it can understand several different encoding
+schemes. In this case the server may choose any one of those and use it to
+encode the response (indicating which one using the Content-Encoding header).
+It's also possible for a client to attach priorities to different schemes so
+that the server knows which it prefers. See sec 14.3 of RFC 2616 for more
+information on the Accept-Encoding header.
+
+* Current support for content encoding:
+
+Support for the 'deflate' and 'gzip' content encoding are supported by
+libcurl. Both regular and chunked transfers should work fine.  The library
+zlib is required for this feature. 'deflate' support was added by James
+Gallagher, and support for the 'gzip' encoding was added by Dan Fandrich.
+
+* The libcurl interface:
+
+To cause libcurl to request a content encoding use:
+
+    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, <string>)
+
+where <string> is the intended value of the Accept-Encoding header.
+
+Currently, libcurl only understands how to process responses that use the
+"deflate" or "gzip" Content-Encoding, so the only values for CURLOPT_ENCODING
+that will work (besides "identity," which does nothing) are "deflate" and
+"gzip" If a response is encoded using the "compress" or methods, libcurl will
+return an error indicating that the response could not be decoded.  If
+<string> is NULL no Accept-Encoding header is generated.  If <string> is a
+zero-length string, then an Accept-Encoding header containing all supported
+encodings will be generated.
+
+The CURLOPT_ENCODING must be set to any non-NULL value for content to be
+automatically decoded.  If it is not set and the server still sends encoded
+content (despite not having been asked), the data is returned in its raw form
+and the Content-Encoding type is not checked.
+
+* The curl interface:
+
+Use the --compressed option with curl to cause it to ask servers to compress
+responses using any format supported by curl.
+
+James Gallagher <jgallagher@gso.uri.edu>
+Dan Fandrich <dan@coneharvesters.com>