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Orb

Compression

Orb supports automatic decompression of responses encoded with gzip, deflate, Brotli, and Zstandard.

Automatic Decompression

Section titled “Automatic Decompression”

Use --compressed to accept and automatically decompress compressed responses:

Terminal window
orb --compressed https://example.com

This sends the header:

Accept-Encoding: zstd, br, gzip, deflate

The server may respond with a compressed body, which orb automatically decompresses before output.

Specific Compression Algorithm

Section titled “Specific Compression Algorithm”

Use --compress-algo to request a specific algorithm:

Terminal window
orb --compress-algo gzip https://example.com

Available algorithms:

  • gzip - Most widely supported
  • deflate - Legacy, widely supported
  • brotli / br - Better compression, good support
  • zstd - Best compression, growing support

How Decompression Works

Section titled “How Decompression Works”
  1. Orb sends Accept-Encoding header with supported algorithms
  2. Server may respond with Content-Encoding header
  3. Orb checks the header and decompresses accordingly
  4. Decompressed content is written to output
Terminal window
# Request with verbose to see headers
orb -v --compressed https://example.com
> Accept-Encoding: zstd, br, gzip, deflate
< Content-Encoding: gzip