inflation

What is inflation?

The 'inflation' npm package is used to handle HTTP content encoding. It automatically decompresses HTTP responses that are compressed using gzip, deflate, or other supported algorithms. This is particularly useful in web applications and APIs where data compression is commonly used to reduce the size of the payload.

What are inflation's main functionalities?

Automatic Decompression

This feature automatically decompresses incoming HTTP requests that are compressed using gzip, deflate, or other supported algorithms. The code sample demonstrates how to use the 'inflation' package to handle decompression in an HTTP server.

const http = require('http');
const inflation = require('inflation');

http.createServer((req, res) => {
  req = inflation(req);
  let data = '';
  req.on('data', chunk => {
    data += chunk;
  });
  req.on('end', () => {
    res.end(data);
  });
}).listen(3000);

Other packages similar to inflation

zlib

The 'zlib' package is a core Node.js module that provides compression and decompression functionalities. Unlike 'inflation', which automatically handles HTTP content encoding, 'zlib' requires manual handling of streams and is more low-level. It supports gzip, deflate, and other compression algorithms.

decompress

The 'decompress' package is used for extracting compressed files. While it is not specifically designed for HTTP content encoding like 'inflation', it supports various compression formats such as zip, tar, and gzip. It is more suitable for file decompression rather than HTTP stream decompression.

node-unzipper

The 'node-unzipper' package is used for unzipping files in Node.js. It is similar to 'decompress' but focuses on zip files. Unlike 'inflation', it is not designed for HTTP content encoding but for handling zip file decompression.

README

inflation

Automatically unzip an HTTP stream.

API

var inflate = require('inflation')

inflate(stream, options)

Returns a stream that emits inflated data from the given stream.

Options:

• encoding - The encoding of the stream (gzip or deflate). If not given, will look in stream.headers['content-encoding'].

Example

var inflate = require('inflation')
var raw     = require('raw-body')

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  raw(inflate(req), 'utf-8', function (err, string) {
    console.dir(string)
  })
})