Minification (programming)

Article summary

Minification (also minimisation or minimization) is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the source code of interpreted programming languages or markup languages without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include whitespace characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network (e.g. the Internet) more efficient. In programmer culture, aiming at extremely minified source code is the purpose of recreational code golf competitions and a part of the demoscene. Minification can be distinguished from the more general concept of data compression in that the minified source can be interpreted immediately without the need for a decompression step: the same interpreter can work with both the original as well as with the minified source. The goals of minification are not the same as the goals of obfuscation; the former is often intended to be reversed using a pretty printer or unminifier. However, to achieve its goals, minification sometimes uses techniques also used by obfuscation; for example, shortening variable names and refactoring the source code.…

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