Having trouble getting content-encoding to show up in response header for get request

Question

I was trying to write a karate test that validated that a particular response header contained the Content-Encoding header field with a value of gzip. I tried on my api where both times the content-encoding field was missing from karate's response. Both of these endpoints returned the content-encoding field on postman and curl commands.

I then tried to hit the postman-echo service to see if it was my api endpoint that karate was having issues with and it seems that it is not only my api. Could someone take a look at my code and see if I am doing something incorrectly to get the header field to show up in the response?

Feature: test getting Content-Encoding

  Background:
    * url 'https://postman-echo.com/gzip'

  Scenario:
    Given header Accept-Encoding = 'gzip'
    When method get
    Then status 200
    And match responseHeaders contains {'Content-Encoding':'#present'}

This is what karate request looks like

1 > GET https://postman-echo.com/gzip
1 > Accept-Encoding: gzip
1 > Connection: Keep-Alive
1 > Host: postman-echo.com
1 > User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.12 (Java/1.8.0_252)

and the response looks like

1 < 200
1 < Connection: keep-alive
1 < Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
1 < Date: Fri, 08 May 2020 16:18:42 GMT
1 < ETag: W/"ef-7kclc8pzXTvQiPUaEOf6j95iFaE"
1 < Vary: Accept-Encoding
1 < set-cookie: sails.sid=s%3A6G_FShPRZH4V1G-tVDfUEEfMwQQmolo5.T2Cb37zqYA21FTyRyIGutVWQWo9ta4EWiod36%2FkM88I; Path=/; HttpOnly
{
  "gzipped": true,
  "headers": {
    "x-forwarded-proto": "https",
    "x-forwarded-port": "443",
    "host": "postman-echo.com",
    "x-amzn-trace-id": "Root=1-5eb58662-c4aaeec26efd116ac0544a18",
    "accept-encoding": "gzip",
    "user-agent": "Apache-HttpClient/4.5.12 (Java/1.8.0_252)"
  },
  "method": "GET"
}

The curl response header is

curl --location --request GET 'https://postman-echo.com/gzip' \
> --header 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' -I

HTTP/2 200 
date: Fri, 08 May 2020 16:21:53 GMT
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
content-length: 220
content-encoding: gzip
etag: W/"dc-BuD8DN1qXT7trYUQtZOuSvbq1pM"
vary: Accept-Encoding
set-cookie: sails.sid=s%3Aj86lznX3nK20fnEN4B3nbHESrfWqVJ3M.236VrsmQp7V%2F7%2BrvG%2FEtlc9yUVLTtylh1yyIAdQJSiY; Path=/; HttpOnly

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 08 '20 at 17:14

This seems to be the way the Apache HttpClient works or how it is configured for Karate. I just found you get the header back with karate-jersey:

1 > GET https://postman-echo.com/gzip
1 > Accept: */*
1 > Accept-Encoding: gzip
1 > User-Agent: Jersey/2.30 (HttpUrlConnection 1.8.0_231)

22:40:48.981 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] DEBUG com.intuit.karate - response time in milliseconds: 1177.37
1 < 200
1 < Connection: keep-alive
1 < Content-Encoding: gzip
1 < Content-Length: 248
1 < Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
1 < Date: Fri, 08 May 2020 17:10:48 GMT
1 < ETag: W/"f8-sigbV4PuNI2Fx08AqzMEqW1WIYY"
1 < Vary: Accept-Encoding

So if Jersey is ok for the rest of your tests, maybe that's all you need. Getting this to work for karate-apache is not a priority for me so if you or anyone else is willing to investigate or fix it, that would be great.

First thanks for the quick response! Looking into it a bit it looks like it's just how Apache HttpClient works it straight up just decompresses the response and removes various headers including Content-Encoding https://stackoverflow.com/a/61011806/13499915. I think that jersey will work out for my use case, thanks for unblocking me — JChu, May 08 '20 at 17:30

Having trouble getting content-encoding to show up in response header for get request

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