zlib.error: Error -3 while decompressing: incorrect header check

Solution 1:

You have this error:

zlib.error: Error -3 while decompressing: incorrect header check

Which is most likely because you are trying to check headers that are not there, e.g. your data follows RFC 1951 (deflate compressed format) rather than RFC 1950 (zlib compressed format) or RFC 1952 (gzip compressed format).

choosing windowBits

But zlib can decompress all those formats:

• to (de-)compress deflate format, use wbits = -zlib.MAX_WBITS
• to (de-)compress zlib format, use wbits = zlib.MAX_WBITS
• to (de-)compress gzip format, use wbits = zlib.MAX_WBITS | 16

See documentation in http://www.zlib.net/manual.html#Advanced (section inflateInit2)

examples

test data:

>>> deflate_compress = zlib.compressobj(9, zlib.DEFLATED, -zlib.MAX_WBITS)
>>> zlib_compress = zlib.compressobj(9, zlib.DEFLATED, zlib.MAX_WBITS)
>>> gzip_compress = zlib.compressobj(9, zlib.DEFLATED, zlib.MAX_WBITS | 16)
>>> 
>>> text = '''test'''
>>> deflate_data = deflate_compress.compress(text) + deflate_compress.flush()
>>> zlib_data = zlib_compress.compress(text) + zlib_compress.flush()
>>> gzip_data = gzip_compress.compress(text) + gzip_compress.flush()
>>> 

obvious test for zlib:

>>> zlib.decompress(zlib_data)
'test'

test for deflate:

>>> zlib.decompress(deflate_data)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
zlib.error: Error -3 while decompressing data: incorrect header check
>>> zlib.decompress(deflate_data, -zlib.MAX_WBITS)
'test'

test for gzip:

>>> zlib.decompress(gzip_data)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
zlib.error: Error -3 while decompressing data: incorrect header check
>>> zlib.decompress(gzip_data, zlib.MAX_WBITS|16)
'test'

the data is also compatible with gzip module:

>>> import gzip
>>> import StringIO
>>> fio = StringIO.StringIO(gzip_data)  # io.BytesIO for Python 3
>>> f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=fio)
>>> f.read()
'test'
>>> f.close()

automatic header detection (zlib or gzip)

adding 32 to windowBits will trigger header detection

>>> zlib.decompress(gzip_data, zlib.MAX_WBITS|32)
'test'
>>> zlib.decompress(zlib_data, zlib.MAX_WBITS|32)
'test'

using gzip instead

or you can ignore zlib and use gzip module directly; but please remember that under the hood, gzip uses zlib.

fh = gzip.open('abc.gz', 'rb')
cdata = fh.read()
fh.close()

Solution 2:

Update: dnozay's answer explains the problem and should be the accepted answer.

Try the gzip module, code below is straight from the python docs.

import gzip
f = gzip.open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'rb')
file_content = f.read()
f.close()

Solution 3:

I just solved the "incorrect header check" problem when uncompressing gzipped data.

You need to set -WindowBits => WANT_GZIP in your call to inflateInit2 (use the 2 version)

Yes, this can be very frustrating. A typically shallow reading of the documentation presents Zlib as an API to Gzip compression, but by default (not using the gz* methods) it does not create or uncompress the Gzip format. You have to send this non-very-prominently documented flag.

Solution 4:

To decompress incomplete gzipped bytes that are in memory, the answer by dnozay is useful but it misses the zlib.decompressobj call which I found to be necessary:

incomplete_decompressed_content = zlib.decompressobj(wbits=zlib.MAX_WBITS | 16).decompress(incomplete_gzipped_content)

Note that zlib.MAX_WBITS | 16 is 15 | 16 which is 31. For some background about wbits, see zlib.decompress.

Credit: answer by Yann Vernier which notes the the zlib.decompressobj call.