Comparison between manual and automated minification/compression

snippets-compression

Testing on code snippet at: https://gist.github.com/991057

Note: used "gzip -n9 file" on Mac to do this comparison.

Not very readable, minifier obsoleted & gzip makes size grow
****************************************************************

function(
  a,
  b
){
  a = a.split(/\b/);
  return(
    b
    || document
  )[
    "getElement" + (
      a[1]
        ? a[0] == "#"
          ? "ById"
          : "sByClassName"
        : "sByTagName"
    )
  ](
    a[1] || a[0]
  )

function(a,b){a=a.split(/\b/);return(b||document)["getElement"+(a[1]?a[0]=="#"?"ById":"sByClassName":"sByTagName")](a[1]||a[0])}

original: 236 bytes
minified: 128 bytes
gzipped: 133 bytes

Still readable, same size after minification & compression
****************************************************************

function(selectors, from) {
  from || (from = document);
  selectors = selectors.split(/\b/);
  return selectors[1] ?
    selectors[0] == '#' ?
      from.getElementById(selectors[1] || selectors[0]) :
      from.getElementsByClass(selectors[1] || selectors[0]) :
    from.getElementsByTagName(selectors[1] || selectors[0]);
}

function(a,b){b||(b=document);a=a.split(/\b/);return a[1]?a[0]=='#'?b.getElementById(a[1]||a[0]):b.getElementsByClass(a[1]||a[0]):b.getElementsByTagName(a[1]||a[0])}

original: 326 bytes
minified: 165 bytes
gzipped: 133 bytes

Use RAW deflate instead of GZIP and the compressed size is as little as 115 bytes.

Oh ! Thank you for remembering me that raw "deflate" is still better than GZIP ! :)

No problem.

http://vervestudios.co/projects/compression-tests/
and
http://www.vervestudios.co/projects/compression-tests/snippet-deflator
can be pretty useful

:-D