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>Is there any way to ask a gzip file which size it will be once unzipped, without needing to decompress it?

The closest is uncompressing it and counting and immediately discarding the bytes in the output stream.

But of course the proper defense is to give up if you exceed a predefined memory or time budget.

Yes, but your decompression middle ware might need an update/change: When you ask for a decompress, you specify the max size (if you are asking it to decompress everything).

I think this is exactly what the HTTP 'HEAD' verb is for: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Methods/HE...

Wouldn't a HEAD give the size of the zipped content, and not the size of the content once decompressed?

This is a great question. I'm actually not sure, since gzip encoding/decoding is built-in to several webservers and browsers.

Decompress it in chunks and stop when a preset limit is reached.