Created to minify batches which may contain many different file formats, multi_minify is an all-in-one minification tool written in Perl.
Presently, multi_minify support minification of the following file formats:
- JSON (
.json) - XML (
.xml,.svg,.dae) - HTML (
.html,.htm)
To use multi_minify, you'll first need to install the provided module, which contains subroutines used by many of the individual language minifiers.
Installation is simple: open a terminal in the multi_minify/ directory and enter the following commands.
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make install
To minify a batch of files, simply run multi_minify.pl as follows, providing an input directory and an output directory.
$ perl multi_minify.pl "/path/to/input/files/" "/path/to/output/files"
Minified files will be written in the provided output directory with min_ prepended to each of their names. Files in the input directory which do not belong to a supported file format will be ignored.
To minify a single file, just provide an input file path and output file path instead as follows.
$ perl multi_minify.pl "/path/to/inputfile.json" "path/to/outputfile.json"
Note that in this case, the output file will be created with the provided name. A prefix such as min_ will not be added to the output file's name.
The minification technique for each supported file format is given below.
| Format | Technique |
|---|---|
| JSON | Newlines are removed. All other whitespace is removed unless it occurs inside of double quotes. |
| XML | Newlines are removed. Between every two tags, if no non-whitespace characters are present, all whitespace is removed. Whitespace before the first tag and after the last tag on each line is removed. |
| HTML | Newlines are removed. Between every two tags, if no non-whitespace characters are present, all whitespace is removed. Whitespace before the first tag and after the last tag on each line is removed. Comments are removed. |
Still have questions? Contact me at ntspencer@mix.wvu.edu and I'll get back to you as quickly as possible!