Re: Hunt the Wumpus

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Jeff Blakeney <jeff.blakeney@a2central.com.remove-gtj-this> wrote:
> I just downloaded the MDC listings but they seem to be uncompressed text
> files with a .gz extensions so when I transferred them, the line feeds
> were not converted to carriage return/line feed (which I believe is
> something HTTP transfers will do) and I had to rename the files to be
> able to open them.
> 
> Is there a reason this was done or did something go amiss?

They're stored this way because, combined, they're 20MB and compress down
to 2MB.  Most browsers will display the content directly, uncompressing the
gzip on the fly, something that usually doesn't happen for formats like .zip.
The result is a file that should be as easily accessible as uncompressed
text, but can be downloaded in 1/10th of the time.

The ".gz" file extension should not be retained by the browser unless you
download the file, in which case it should still be in gzip format.  Anything
that can uncompress gzip should also know how to convert line terminators.

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