Decompress gzipped http response inside Vim

Question

For debugging purposes I sniffed some requests and responses from my server/client. The compression is enabled so the responses are sent in gzip format. I know that probably I could just disable mod_deflate, but... out of curiosity, is there a way to decompress the gzipped response right in vim?

Here's an example of a response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:00:18 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.19
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="combo"
Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:00:18 GMT
Expires: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:00:20 GMT
Pragma: 
Accept-Ranges: none
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 209
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=79
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/css

^_<8b>^H^@^@^@^@^@^@^C<94><8f>Í^N<82>0^P<84>ï>E^SÏ%^H)<87>öiJ»@cm<9b>º <84>øîò#ê^Ac<ìafvçË&JZpZF
^]8¤A:°d,¥:×Ñ·NSå­<8f>üX^T<85>(}Ô^Py^VzrõÖhòáÒ<9b>ÑØp<92><92>9<9e>'^U÷C²[<9f>^L­É©ï Z9L^@<87>S¶^G­ªj<83><9e>ÞPÆ<98>¸ÈX^[GÑ^GNYè7m¡ÂÕø<8f>Ýdɲ<84>^F-<90>qmãùÄdë7"H­<8d>«y*^Pz¤Ò<9a>Úq5<9d>@üÎZÄë¿g+ûÕö^@^@^@ÿÿ^C^@d«^X^^<94>^A^@^@

I'd like to select the gzipped text section and decompress it on the fly (maybe running a terminal command on it? something like :!sort to sort lines...)

Answer 1

Select the gzipped text section (or provide a range, e.g. :/^$\n\zs/,$). Then you can unzip the part by piping it through the external gunzip command (which naturally must be installed and accessible):

:!gunzip -

When I tested this, the buffer had to be opened in 'binary' mode: :edit ++bin filename. Also, I got gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file after the unpacked contents, but that probably can be tolerated.