Minify HTML that has PHP embedded inside of it

Question

I know it's a very small performance tweak but I would like to minify an HTML document that has PHP embedded inside of it.

For example:

<div id="header">
  <?php
    echo "<ul>\n<li>";
    echo $somevar;
    echo "</li>\n<ul>\n";
  ?>
</div>

Would produce an output of:

<div id="header">
  <ul>
    <li>Foobar</li>
  <ul>
</div>

But I would like for the output to be minified. I can manually remove spaces and line endings from the PHP output, so it looks like so:

<div id="header">
  <ul><li>Foobar</li><ul></div>

But the surrounding HTML document needs to be minified as well. How can this be done? (Imagining this example in a larger document context.)

Arnaud Le Blanc · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-16 19:12:40Z

2

You can remove all unnecessary whitespaces with a simple regex:

preg_replace('#>\s+<#s', '><', $html);

(This removes all whitespaces between > and < chars.)

Now to do this on your generated html code, you can use output buffering:

<?php
ob_start();
// everything bellow is captured and not echoed
?>
<div id="header">
    ...
</div>
<?php
// get generated html and stop buffering
$html = ob_get_clean();
echo preg_replace('#>\s+<#s', '><', $html);
?>

answered Sep 16, 2012 at 19:12

Arnaud Le Blanc

100k24 gold badges211 silver badges196 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Whymarrh Over a year ago

If I understand correctly, this seems great. But could you explain a bit more: what is ob_start() and ob_get_clean() in relationship to preg_replace()?

Arnaud Le Blanc Over a year ago

ob_start starts buffering, ob_get_clean stops buffering and returns what has been buffered. preg_replace is then used to remove white spaces from what has been buffered, and echo the result

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Minify HTML that has PHP embedded inside of it

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related