What is Gzip / Zlib / Deflate?
Gzip / Zlib / Deflate is a compression and decompression tool supporting the three most common deflate-based encoding formats. Gzip is the standard for HTTP content encoding and file compression. Zlib adds a compact header and checksum around deflated data, commonly used in PNG files and many network protocols. Raw Deflate is the bare compression algorithm without any wrapper.
These formats appear everywhere in web development and systems programming. HTTP responses use Content-Encoding: gzip. SAML assertions are deflated before Base64 encoding. Database backups, log archives, and binary protocols all rely on these compression methods. DevKit lets you quickly compress or decompress data without reaching for command-line tools.
How to Use Gzip / Zlib / Deflate
For compression, type or paste the text you want to compress and select the algorithm. The tool produces the compressed output as hex bytes or Base64, along with the compression ratio. For decompression, paste compressed data as hex or Base64. The tool auto-detects whether the data is Gzip (by the 1f8b magic bytes), Zlib (by the header byte), or raw Deflate, and decompresses accordingly.
The output panel displays the decompressed text or hex dump for binary data, along with the original compressed size and decompressed size.
Common Use Cases
- HTTP debugging: Decompress gzipped API responses captured from network tools like Charles Proxy, mitmproxy, or browser developer tools.
- SAML troubleshooting: Inflate deflated SAML requests that use the HTTP-Redirect binding, which applies raw Deflate before Base64 encoding.
- Log archive inspection: Decompress gzipped log files from cloud services (AWS CloudWatch, GCP Logging) to read their contents directly.
- Protocol analysis: Decompress zlib-compressed data from binary protocols, game packets, or database wire formats.
- Compression testing: Test compression ratios for different data types to optimize payload sizes for bandwidth-constrained applications.