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.)

Answer 1

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);
?>