[Feature Request]: Minify unicode-ranges

[strarsis]

What should be improved?

unicode-ranges can be minified by mixing codepoints, wildcards and ranges.

(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/unicode-range)

Describe the solution you would like

Simplify unicode ranges as much as possible.

E.g. (ABCD 1234):
unicode-range: U+20,U+31,U+32,U+33,U+34,U+35,U+41,U+42,U+43,U+44;

Can be minified to:
unicode-range: U+20,U+31-35,U+41-44;

With a wildcard (e.g. @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO):
unicode-range: U+40,U+41,U+42,U+43,U+44,U+45,U+46,U+47,U+48,U+49,U+4A,U+4B,U+4C,U+4D,U+4E,U+4F

Can be minified to a range:
unicode-range: U+40-4F;

And even to a wildcard, shorter yet:
unicode-range: U+4?;

Possible alternatives

Well, just not minifying unicode ranges, but this leaves basically risk-free minification on the table.

Additional context

The Unicode Range Interchange library/tool from @zachleat can already minify those unicode ranges,
so that functionality could be reused:
https://www.zachleat.com/unicode-range-interchange/
Though it does not support wildcards, which can minify even further, when applicable.

Are you willing to work on this?

• Yes, I would like to help

[zachleat]

https://www.npmjs.com/package/characterset/ is the upstream dependency you want!

[strarsis]

@zachleat: Thanks! I moved a related issue to that repository by the way: bramstein/characterset#5

[ludofischer]

Thank you for teaching me about yet another CSS 'descriptor'. My first instinct is to say that the size improvements are likely going to be negligible, as the unicode-range seems to be useful only inside @font-face, so it is unlikely that there are going to be many instances in a single stylesheet. cssnano can't include the https://www.npmjs.com/package/characterset/ as it seems to be ES6 only.

[zachleat]

fwiw if you use the 1.x release it works fine in CJS (and I’ve used it for many years)

[ben-eb]

We do some of that already with https://github.com/cssnano/cssnano/tree/master/packages/postcss-normalize-unicode - the last example you mentioned with wildcards is already transformed 🙂