Wise Monks, I have a question about perl and CGI applications.

I have a CGI application which dynamically generates very large pages (up to arround 20 mb of html). Naturally this can take some time, not only to generate, but also to transmit across the web, and display on the client side. I am currently investigating ways to reduce the size of the HTML, but that is not what I want to ask here. I know there is a mod for apache which will gzip the output from a script, in a way which the browser will recognise and unzip automagically. I, however, have had no success in getting this plug-in to function properly. My question is: Is there a way to do this entirely on the perl side? I would like to build a string in perl, gzip it, and send it to the browser and have it automagically unzipped and displayed by the client browser. I'm sure there are modules on CPAN to gzip a string, but is there some header I need to send in order to tell the browser to unzip the data before trying to display it? I am working in perl 5.6.1 on Red Hat linux 8.0, with apache 1.27, and the application is designed to work in IE 5.0 and later.

May the Force be with you

In reply to OFT: Gzipping output from a CGI by JediWizard

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