I've been stuck for awhile trying to uncompress .Z text files on the fly. I have a series of files to get off the company's intranet some are straight text files and some have been compressed. The plain text files are simple using LWP and just loading the content into a variable to then playing with it. I've not been able to get the compressed files to uncompress nicely. I've been trying to use the Compress::Zlib module. A snippet of the appropriate code follows: 
use Compress::Zlib;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;

use strict;
....etc.

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->proxy('http', 'http://some.proxy.com:8000/');
my $file = "somefile.Z";
my $page="http://somehost.com/$file";
my $request = new HTTP::Request("GET", $page);
my $response = $ua->request($request);
   if($response->is_success && $response->header('Content-Encoding') =
+~ /compress/){
       $stuff = Compress::Zlib::uncompress($response->content_ref);
    }
play with data...

[download]
Basically $stuff is undef. If I use the inflate process provided in Compress::Zlib I get a status of Z_DATA_ERROR (-3). I don't see why the returned content shouldn't just decompress. I've checked the files and they are properly x-compressed. What am I missing? Does the web client not return the compressed file properly? Help!

In reply to Help with Uncompressing Data by Anonymous Monk

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