Hi everybody,

The zlib extension allows to compress data in memory using
the gzencode() function for gzip-like output format.
There are other compression formats supported as well, and
currently there are two functions to reverse compression:

gzdeflate()   <-->   gzinflate()
gzcompress()  <-->   gzuncompress()
gzencode()    <-->   ???

So the reverse "gzdecode" is missing, However the gzip-format
is the most heavily used one. (the two decompression methods
didn't work for me with gzencoded data)
The only solution here is to write the gzip-data string to a
newly opened temporary file and reopen it using gzopen()...

But I think there should be a in-memory decompression of those
gzip-data streams as well (as using the file io ones is much
slower of course). I don't know if there is such a function in
the libz.so, but PHP should have one nevertheless.