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Answer 1

+4 A:

Personally, I just enabled HTTP compression in the server and I leave my HTML readable.

But for what you want, you could just use String.replaceAll() with a regex that matching what you have specified. Off the top of my head, something like:

small=large.replaceAll("\s{2,}"," ");

Software Monkey 2009-03-06 03:20:52

The only problem is that if you have a string that contains spaces, then those spaces will be erased as well. Also it will break alot of HTML formatting just for example "<table border=1.." would turn out as "<tableborder=1.." HTML parser will choke on that. :P

Suroot 2009-03-06 03:22:36

@Suroot no, it's fine. It replaces multiple spaces with just one.

sblundy 2009-03-06 03:29:09

@ sblundy but "Hello World" will become "Hello World" which isn't what you want if "Hello World" is what is supposed to be displayed.

TofuBeer 2009-03-06 03:33:09

Well, that's some basic compression and that's what I am currently doing. It gets much deeper than that if you want to do it perfect and remove all possible characters (different rules apply for inside and outside of the tags). I think it is a common task and hope that someone already did it right.

serg 2009-03-06 03:34:46

@Suroot Browsers convert multiple spaces to a single space. For example, your two "Hello Worlds" look the same. If you want multiple spaces, you need to use @nbsp;.

sblundy 2009-03-06 03:39:05

Of course, if you rely on multiple spaces for formatting inside a <pre> tag, this will be fubared.

Evan 2009-03-06 04:00:27

@Evan good point.

sblundy 2009-03-06 04:03:30

Which is why I don't like screwing with the HTML, preferring HTTP compression.

Software Monkey 2009-03-06 06:07:30

For HTML, compressing any multispaces to one within a tag, including attribute values, should have no impact. The only corner case is <pre> and tag content whose CSS class has pre-format behavior.

Software Monkey 2009-03-06 06:09:40

Answer 2

+1 A:

input.replaceAll("\s+", " ");

will convert any whitespace into a single space

cobbal 2009-03-06 03:27:17

but it will also replace any single space with a single space, won't it? Which is wasted cycles.

Software Monkey 2009-03-06 03:32:36

Of course, if you rely on multiple spaces for formatting inside a <pre> tag, this will be fubared.

Evan 2009-03-06 03:58:48

Answer 3

+1 A:

Assuming the desire is to make the HTML smaller to optimize the bytes sent over the network why not have the HTTP server do the work? Read here.

Will this work? Not free unfortunately.

TofuBeer 2009-03-06 03:32:12

Already using it. I still would like to have a compression though.

serg 2009-03-06 03:38:52

Does it have to be Java? DoOes it have to be free?

TofuBeer 2009-03-06 03:42:59

There's no point at all in whitespace collapsing your HTML if you are applying HTTP compression - the end result will be so close as to not matter for the size of data across the wire. WS collapsing just adds another pre-deployment step.

Software Monkey 2009-03-06 06:12:50

could be doing it to make it harder to read the source of the page...

TofuBeer 2009-03-06 06:35:12

Answer 4

+2 A:

Be careful with that. Text inside pre and textarea elements will be damaged. In addition, inlined javascript inside script elements will have to be ended with column;. Lastly if you code inlined javascript with html comments (to avoid some old browser buggy behavior) this will eventually comment out the whole inlined javascript code.

Why do you want to do that? If you want to decrease the download size of the html then all you need is a GZIP filter.

cherouvim 2009-03-06 07:39:06

Answer 5

+1 A:

Looks like there is no library that does that so I created my own open source project for solving this task, maybe someone will find it helpful: http://code.google.com/p/htmlcompressor/

serg 2009-03-14 00:50:00

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