The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms MUST be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field. Content-Encoding is primarily used to allow a document to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media type.
Content-Encoding = "Content-Encoding" ":" 1#content-coding
Content codings are defined in section 3.5. An example of its use is
Content-Encoding: gzip
The Content-Encoding is a characteristic of the entity identified by the Request-URI. Typically, the entity-body is stored with this encoding and is only decoded before rendering or analogous usage.
If multiple encodings have been applied to an entity, the content codings MUST be listed in the order in which they were applied.
Additional information about the encoding parameters MAY be provided by other entity-header fields not defined by this specification.