Appengine, Urlfetch, And The Content-length Header

I have a Google Appengine app requesting pages from another server using urllib2 POSTs. I recently enabled gzip compression on the other server running Apache2, and the Appengine

Solution 1:

According to this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java/browse_thread/thread/5c5f2a7e2d2beadc?pli=1) on an Appengine Java newsgroup, Google does generally set the 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' header on urlfetch requests, and then decompresses (ungzips) the input before handing the data to the script.

So apparently, Appengine adds an accept-encoding: gzip header implicitly on the requests way out to the internet, and decompresses the response, but does not insert a content-length into the headers for the decompressed data size. So if the outside server will provide gzipped responses, the net result to the Appengine script (after all the pre- and post- processing behavior by Appengine described above) is the loss of the content-length header.