April 28, 2007

Reducing HTML output size

find more posts in: php

I recently found myself writing a small web app for my friend Brian to use on his cell phone, one of the last places where page size really matters. Since every character counts, we want to keep our page structure lean and mean (probably a good idea on a mobile device anyway). But after that there’s a lazy, completely pain-free step we can take: stripping all of the redundant whitespace from our HTML.

With PHP’s output buffer handlers we can just set it and forget it:

function clean_html($output){
	$output = preg_replace("/\n/", "", $output);
	$output = preg_replace("/\t/", "", $output);
	$output = preg_replace("/\s+/", " ", $output);
	return $output;
}
 
ob_start('clean_html');
 
//a bunch of stuff that prints out html
 
ob_flush();

This will give use one long, ugly line of dense markup, but what do we care? It’s still valid and the browser handles it just fine. This seems to reduce page size by about 10-20% in this particular application.

7 Responses

  1. 1 jason parchment Apr 28th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

    i’d like to use this some day. perhaps when i start caring about other people’s cell billz. lolz u no??

  2. 2 joey Apr 28th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    jase you should be worried about your mom’s cell bill, she’s callin me like 24/7

  3. 3 jason parchment Apr 28th, 2007 at 10:00 pm

    she has free national calling it’s all good. also, a raging yeast infection.

  4. 4 joey Apr 28th, 2007 at 10:01 pm

    oh she might want to get a hepatitis test too, keep it on the dl.

  5. 5 so guay Apr 28th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    GAY

  6. 6 alfonso ribiero Apr 29th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    WHAT

  7. 7 VIOLETTA WALLACE May 3rd, 2007 at 1:21 am

    DEY TOOK MY SON. OVER WHAT? SOME MUSIC? IT HURTS, IN MI CHEST.

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My name is Joey Nelson. I'm a web developer living in Portland, OR. I'm married to an awesome lady and we have two weird little pugs. I do a weekly comedy podcast and make dumb songs with this guy Ben. I don't post to this blog very often, and very few people actually read it. If you'd like to find out more about my fascinating life, check this stuff out:
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