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I was searching for methods to remove comments and whitespace from CSS files in PHP and I found this article (3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP).
The article suggests this code by Reinhold Weber, which I thought was a pretty good place to start:
<?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
ob_start("compress");
function compress($buffer) {
/* remove comments */
$buffer = preg_replace('!/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*/!', '', $buffer);
/* remove tabs, spaces, newlines, etc. */
$buffer = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n", "\t", ' ', ' ', ' '), '', $buffer);
return $buffer;
}
/* your css files */
include('master.css');
include('typography.css');
include('grid.css');
include('print.css');
include('handheld.css');
ob_end_flush();
?>
Later I found css_strip_whitespace by nyctimus in the documentation for the PHP method strip_whitespace. It looks like this:
function css_strip_whitespace($css)
{
$replace = array(
"#/\*.*?\*/#s" => "", // Strip C style comments.
"#\s\s+#" => " ", // Strip excess whitespace.
);
$search = array_keys($replace);
$css = preg_replace($search, $replace, $css);
$replace = array(
": " => ":",
"; " => ";",
" {" => "{",
" }" => "}",
", " => ",",
"{ " => "{",
";}" => "}", // Strip optional semicolons.
",\n" => ",", // Don't wrap multiple selectors.
"\n}" => "}", // Don't wrap closing braces.
"} " => "}\n", // Put each rule on it's own line.
);
$search = array_keys($replace);
$css = str_replace($search, $replace, $css);
return trim($css);
}
The latter function is the one that I used, and I’m quite happy with it. I’ve been working on HTML and JavaScript compressors too, and those are much more difficult file formats to deal with than CSS.