Reading gzipped HTTP response in Go

EDIT: The following is an example of manually handling compression. If you don’t set the header, the default Transport will do it for you and then decompress while you read the response.Body.

client := new(http.Client)

request, err := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://stackoverflow.com", nil)
request.Header.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip")

response, err := client.Do(request)
defer response.Body.Close()

// Check that the server actually sent compressed data
var reader io.ReadCloser
switch response.Header.Get("Content-Encoding") {
case "gzip":
    reader, err = gzip.NewReader(response.Body)
    defer reader.Close()
default:
    reader = response.Body
}

io.Copy(os.Stdout, reader) // print html to standard out

Error handling removed for brevity. I kept the defers.