I am trying to compress a large string on a client program in C# (.net 4) and send it to a server (django, python 2.7) using a PUT request. Ideally I want to use the standard library at both ends, so I am trying to use gzip.
My C# code is:
public static string Compress(string s) {
var bytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(s);
using (var msi = new MemoryStream(bytes))
using (var mso = new MemoryStream()) {
using (var gs = new GZipStream(mso, CompressionMode.Compress)) {
msi.CopyTo(gs);
}
return Convert.ToBase64String(mso.ToArray());
}
}
The python code is:
s = base64.standard_b64decode(request)
buff = cStringIO.StringIO(s)
with gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buff) as gz:
decompressed_data = gz.read()
It's almost working, but the output is: {▯"▯c▯h▯a▯n▯g▯e▯d▯"▯} when it should be {"changed"}, i.e. every other letter is something weird. If I take out every other character by doing decompressed_data[::2], then it works, but it's a bit of a hack, and clearly there is something else wrong.
I'm wondering if I need to base64 encode it at all for a PUT request? Is this only necessary for POST?