Zero-length chunks: are they expected?

[michalc]

The last chunk in the below is of length zero:

with httpx.stream('GET', 'https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/packages/ffmpeg-4.4-essentials_build.zip') as r:
    for chunk in r.iter_bytes():
        print(len(chunk))

is this expected?

It also looks like iter_raw doesn't have a zero length chunk at the end:

with httpx.stream('GET', 'https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/packages/ffmpeg-4.4-essentials_build.zip') as r:
    for chunk in r.iter_raw():
        print(len(chunk))

since in this case there is no content-encoding, I guess I expect that iter_bytes == iter_raw

---

Having a bit of a nose around the code, suspecting it's from

httpx/httpx/_models.py

Line 1483 in 47d712c

decoded = decoder.flush()

where decoder.flush() returns an empty bytes instance, this is passed to chunker.decode, and since chunk_size is None, a list containing this empty bytes instance is returned

httpx/httpx/_decoders.py

Line 172 in 47d712c

return [content]

and then each element of this list is yielded to the calling code

---

This is related to uktrade/stream-unzip#13, where the code in stream-unzip does not expect any zero length chunks. Potentially stream-unzip should be robust against this case... but wasn't sure if this was desirable in httpx, so mentioning it here in case it is an issue to be addressed.

[tomchristie]

Thanks @michalc - I've escalated this into #1739.

Short version is that we're not currently making any assertions one way or the other about if any chunks might be zero-length, but it'd clearly be preferable from a UX perspective if it didn't ever do this.