Compressing web pages with php, javascript, html, and css in them

Question

I have found utilities that can compress html, javascript, and css files individually. However, lets say I have a file called homepage.php with php at the top of the page, css and javascript in the header, html in the body along with more php code and perhaps some more javascript. Sometimes, the chunks with javascript may also have php in it (for transferring php values to javascript). Are there any utilities that can handle compressing such pages?

Going through every file, breaking it apart manually, and compressing everything individually can get very tedious. Even something that can just compress the html and css in the files and ignore the javascript and php would be extremely useful. Most of my javascript is in external js files anyway.

Answer 1

If the idea behind this question is to use less bandwidth, then I suggest you use an apache output filter (assuming that you are using apache as webserver anyway). Just filter all PHP scripts and static HTML pages with ie. mod_deflate, and you'll use less bandwidth.

Answer 2

Normally, compression of html, js and css files is done to reduce bandwidth usage as the files are sent to the user's browser, resulting in faster page loads.

Is this your purpose? Why would you want to send php to the browser?

If your purpose is not faster page loads but saving disk space, you could just use gzip or something. But it seems almost pointless.

Answer 3

Even if there is not a tool that would let you do all minifaction at once, you could automate this easily with DOM. Just parse the page and find all <script> and <style> elements. Then run their content through third party libs like JsMin or CSSMin and replace the nodes with the output.

However, you could also just enable gzip compression in your webserver, which should be more than enough compression for most websites. Or did you run into any traffic limits lately?

Answer 4

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I'll be using apache to compress the files but wanted to make something to remove all the line breaks in css and html segments of the page before hand. I couldn't find anything to do that while leaving the php and javascript untouched in a file, so I made my own script to do it.

The following code can definitely be improved and is very, very raw. There's a lot of spots where I can make it more efficient, but this is just a test of an idea. However, it's working well enough to use. Just save it to a php file, and set $file_name to the name of your file.

<?

function parsefile($file)
{

    $contents = file_get_contents($file);

    $contents = preg_replace('/<!--(.|\s)*?-->/', '', $contents);
    $contents = str_replace('<?', ' <? ', $contents);
    $contents = str_replace('?>', ' ?> ', $contents);
    $contents = str_replace('<script', ' <script', $contents);
    $contents = str_replace('script>', 'script> ', $contents);

    $filtered = '';

    $length = strlen($contents);

    $ignore = Array();
    $html = Array();

    for($i = 0;$i <= $length;$i++)
    {

        if(substr($contents, $i, 2) == '<?')
        {

            $end = strpos($contents, '?>', $i) + 2;

            array_push($ignore, Array('php', $i, $end));
            $i = $end;

        }
        else if(strtolower(substr($contents, $i, 7)) == '<script')
        {

            $end = strpos($contents, '</script>', $i) + 9;

            array_push($ignore, Array('js', $i, $end));
            $i = $end;

        }

    }

    $ignore_c = count($ignore) - 1;

    for($i = 0;$i <= $ignore_c;$i++)
    {

        $start = $ignore[$i][2];

        if($start < $length)
        {

            array_push($html, Array('html', $start+1, $ignore[$i+1][1]-1));

        }

    }

    function cmp($a, $b)
    {
    if ($a[1] == $b[1]) {
        return 0;
    }
    return ($a[1] < $b[1]) ? -1 : 1;
    }

    $parts = array_merge($ignore, $html);

    usort($parts, "cmp");

    foreach($parts as $k => $v)
    {

        $cont = substr($contents, $parts[$k][1], ($parts[$k][2]-$parts[$k][1]));

        if($parts[$k][0] == 'html')
        {

            $cont = str_replace(Array("\n", "\t", "  ", "   ", "    "), " ", $cont);

        }

        $filtered .= $cont;

    }

    return $filtered;

}

$file_name = '../main.php';
$filtered = parsefile($file_name);

echo '<textarea style="width:700px;height:600px">' . file_get_contents($file_name) . '</textarea>';
echo '&nbsp;&nbsp;<textarea style="width:700px;height:600px">' . $filtered . '</textarea>';

?>

With some tinkering, this code can be modified to iterate through all the files in a directory and save them to another directory as minified versions.